And so we come to the final round of power rankings for the 2026 Ballon d'Or. Of course, the eligibility period for the competition long since ended with Spain crowned world champions. On Oct. 26, the consensus best player in the world for last season will be revealed.

Who exactly that might be seems far more up in the air than in most years. Twelve months ago, for instance, the narrative had swung irresistibly behind Ousmane Dembele. It did not matter that Mohamed Salah and Raphinha had better pure output. Dembele had a better story, the long-admired talent finally putting it all together and at just the right moment to be the best player in the best club side in the world. All the leading honors -- frankly, that's just the Champions League -- were his.

If you are wondering why you are hearing so much from Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane in recent weeks, well it's because they all know there are likely swing voters to be won before the deadline of Sept. 28. Neither they nor anyone else have an unassailable candidacy after a season of several excellent individual campaigns but few, if any, legitimately great ones.

In a related development, the very best performers of the club season did not take home that one extra trophy to buttress their campaign. Bayern Munich and Barcelona won their domestic leagues. Big whoop. The English champions almost exist as a counter to the individual qualities the Ballon d'Or glorifies. Arsenal won the league in spite of the absence of their star forwards, a triumph of depth and resilience that is unlikely to earn them a host of podium spots. Paris Saint-Germain repeated the league and Champions League double but half their strongest XI barely showed up in Ligue 1. Dembele can hardly repeat off around 2500 minutes for club and nation last season.

As is always the case, the World Cup promises to warp voting. It clarifies little among the front runners. Kane and Mbappe had great individual tournaments but one of the Ballon d'Or's three criteria is "team performances and achievements". England and France fell short there. Yamal fulfills that but Spain's triumph was one of the collective, the greatest prize in the sport won despite their forward struggling with injury.

Meanwhile, the best at the tournament do not sit easily in this ranking. Rodri might have held Spain together but his domestic season was hampered by injury. Lionel Messi's historic standing was only buttressed by what he did as a 39-year-old, but your mileage may vary as to the significance of an MLS Cup-winning run beforehand.

Furthermore, this year more than most, then, there is no right answer. This, at least, is the least wrong I can offer. And we'll end this preamble with a customary reminder: this is not a prediction for who will win the Ballon d'Or. If you want that, consult your preferred sportsbook, I guess. This is who ought to win it. You will probably disagree.

Perhaps it was the endings to his tilts at the Champions League and World Cup that make it so hard to lock in on Kane as the best player in the world last season. If the 33-year-old really were that good, would he not have found a way to bend the biggest games in his direction? That semifinal against Argentina in particular was one of those late-summer Kane games where he looks too leggy to impact the game either in the penalty area or the midfield roles he drops into, usually with such success.

That's one game though. There are another 64 where he was frequently spectacular. A remarkable 73 goals for club and nation is the sort of output that belonged back in Messi's prime years. The absolute biggest game may not have gone his way but Kane was unforgettable against the Ivory Coast, thrilling in both legs against PSG and incisive in putting Real Madrid to the sword.

Additionally, then there are the Bundesliga numbers. Gaudy output is the baseline for a Bayern striker against domestic opposition but still the only players to have bettered Kane's 36 goals in 31 league games are Gerd Muller and Robert Lewandowski. The former won the Ballon d'Or, the latter probably would have if it had been awarded in 2020. There is no reason why Kane should not get it this time.

PSG were ultimately the best side in Europe last season and yet judging which of their players deserves the Ballon d'Or is a challenge. Ligue 1 might not demand much of them but it does feel unreasonable to reward a player who spent half his weekends watching on from the sidelines because his head coach can afford to save him for the trickier tests that come with retaining the Champions League. At some point there has to be a minutes restriction. If you're not seeing the pitch for half of your team's league minutes, then it is really hard to make a case for you to be one of the 10 best performers in the world last season. Either you were injured, unfortunate but still a disqualifying factor, or your team are not frequently playing opponents of a sufficient standard.

All of which is to say that Dembele, Joao Neves, Nuno Mendes and even you Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, you've got to go. Yes, you looked like some of the best players in the world in the spring. It's just that you had most of the autumn off.

It is worth noting that as for Vitinha, there's a reason why he played nearly 4000 club minutes and only one other starter in the Champions League final cleared 3000. The Portuguese midfielder was the engine without which his side could not motor forward. Across Europe's top five leagues, he ranked third for progressive carries per 90 minutes and second for progressive passes. Unlike most tempo setters in midfield, he also weighed in with crucial goals and assists, firmly establishing himself as the best midfielder on the planet.

The sport's assist king last season. If we consider domestic cups and leagues, European matches and the World Cup, then Michael Olise ended the year with 10 more goals laid on for his teammates than anyone else. The summer definitively proved that he could be the lead attacker in a frontline made up of some of the best forwards in the world, but then again, his form with Bayern Munich had shown as much.

In general, when we're reflecting back on the season, we shouldn't lean too heavily on forecasted goals and assists. What we're really looking at is actual returns and if that meant a player was out over the skis, well, more power to them. Having noted that, I mean, talk about separating yourself from the field.

In the broader context, in pure output terms, Yamal, still just 19 years of age, was perhaps a little off the peak of Europe's attackers, 37 goals and assists when Kane, Olise and Mbappe were all in the 40s or higher. Still, it was enough that a starring role in the World Cup might just have swung Yamal into top spot. Unfortunately, a biceps femoris injury put paid to the prospect of him showing more than flashes of his best self in the summer.

Unfortunately for Yamal, that was the story of his 25-26, where 96 days were lost to injuries that included a nagging groin issue in the autumn. That is among the most common problems faced by young footballers who are still growing into the bodies of seasoned athletes. On the evidence of when he was on the pitch, Yamal will be a Ballon d'Or winner when he has reached full physical maturity.

Here's maybe the trickiest candidacy to get a read on. In terms of goal contributions, only Kane beats him, and when the lights shone brightest at the World Cup, Mbappe was phenomenal. By the time he retires, likely with at least two more tournaments under his belt, his high watermark for World Cup scoring might look a bit like Michael Phelps' Olympic gold record or Wilt Chamberlain's scoring titles.

Notably, for an individual award, individual output really matters. If the Ballon d'Or were about team performance, then you would have the ludicrous scenario where Real Madrid campaigned for Dani Carvajal to win the prize in 2024 if Rodri was going to get it anyway. After all, he was there for the Euro 2024 win and the Champions League too. That'd be mad. Aaah.

Nonetheless, team success is one of the criteria and it's one that needs to be at least partially weighed when you play for Real Madrid and France. You can't make the Russell Westbrook 2017 case for Mbappe. His goals and assists need to lead to something. In the summer they very nearly did.

A reminder once again that this is not a prediction. Gabriel Magalhaes probably is not going to make the top 10. The best odds you can find of him winning the Ballon d'Or are +6600, an implied probability of 1.5%. That's defenders and this prize, folks. Only three of them have won it in history. Franz Beckenbauer is the only one to have managed it without winning the prominent international tournament of that year.

Significantly, there is a reason for that. The most valuable and difficult skill in this sport is scoring goals. In the era of three points for a win, attack tends to deliver the biggest prizes. That's what made Arsenal's Premier League win so remarkable. It and the near miss in the Champions League final were built on one of the most exceptional defenses in the history of this sport, anchored by the brilliant Gabriel, whose blend of skill and tenacity made him the best Arsenal player last season.

With shot-disrupting qualities that are Victor Wembanyama-esque -- 13.2% of shots Arsenal faced when Gabriel was on the field were blocked by their No. 6 -- the man the Emirates Stadium calls the king of Brazil made it far harder for the other team to do that most valuable and difficult thing on the pitch. It takes something special for a defense to carry an injury-riddled team to a league title. That Gabriel anchored that something special merits a very high place in the final voting.

Now, here's a weird one. As what might broadly be viewed as the third attacker on Bayern Munich, it's really hard to make a case for Luis Diaz winning the Ballon d'Or. Even he has been arguing that his teammate Kane should get it. "For me, he's number one to win it," Diaz expressed earlier this month. "Hopefully he gets it. We're trying to make his case to win it."

Meanwhile, what we are really arguing here is that Diaz was so excellent in his particular role that it makes him one of the 10 best footballers in the world last season. With 39 goals and assists combined, it is not that hard a case to make. Diaz was also an exceptional passer, an outstanding creator for others and vital at moving Bayern into dangerous areas. There are players below him in this list who have more of a case to have been the best player in the world but really no one ranked sixth, seventh or eighth is actually going to win the Ballon d'Or. Consider this a reflection on how impactful Diaz was.

The inverse of a player such as Diaz might be Bruno Fernandes, who took a far inferior team on his back and propelled them to levels that they would not have gotten close to otherwise. When Fernandes started moving through the gears in the back half of the season, Manchester United flew from midtable to the Champions League.

Along with Gabriel, Fernandes is the player who tells the story of the great tactical trend of 2025-26 as well as anyone. Nine of his record-breaking 21 Premier League assists came from set pieces and for a time there might have been no attacking scenario more difficult to defend than Fernandes standing over a corner, lobbing it into a mass of bodies from which Casemiro would often rise the highest.

On a related note, it wasn't just set pieces for Fernandes, whose 99 open-play chances created were 22 more than any other player in Europe's top five leagues last season. For a sense of just how impactful he was, one need only observe how United are struggling now that he has come back down to earth.

For these last two, the question really is how much importance you place on the World Cup. Obviously, it is the peak of the sport but what happens when you've spent the rest of your time playing at a level that ClubELO and Opta would consider to be a fair way below England's second tier, at or around the level of the Norwegian, Ecuadorian and Swiss domestic leagues? If you're as historically excellent as Messi, you're probably going to look sprightlier and more incisive than those who have spent the preceding nine months slogging their way through the Champions League and European domestic seasons.

If that sounds like a means of diminishing Messi's brilliance at the World Cup, it shouldn't be. Being the best player on the runners-up at 39 is an exceptional achievement, one that only serves to reinforce his status as the greatest of all time. It also should have resulted in him being named player of the tournament. The Ballon d'Or, yet, is awarded for the period from Aug. 3, 2025 to July 19, 2026. For too much of that, Messi was playing at a level that was simply beneath his talents.

In a related development, somewhat as above, really. At the World Cup, Rodri was Rodri, the player who was so eminently worthy of winning the 2024 Ballon d'Or. When Spain had the ball, Rodri, now at Barcelona, was the man who moved them through the lines, who carried the ball almost as effectively as he passed it. When Spain didn't have the ball, Rodri got it back for them.

Flashes of that Rodri had emerged as he stepped up his recovery from an ACL injury in his final months as a Manchester City player. He was brilliant for a half against Chelsea in January, the best player on the pitch when City beat Arsenal in the EFL Cup final. Even Pep Guardiola, nevertheless, knew that the "real Rodri" would not emerge until later on in the season. That puts a hard cap on where he can rank.