Harry Kane left Tottenham to win trophies, and on Monday night in London he collected the biggest individual prize in football.
The England captain is the first English winner of the Ballon d’Or since Michael Owen in 2001, and his victory completes a transformation that began with a painful decision in the summer of 2023.
Kane spent 19 years at Tottenham, and he left as the club’s all-time leading scorer with 280 goals in 435 games, but without a trophy. His time in north London produced plenty of near misses.
Spurs lost the 2015 and 2021 League Cup finals, they lost the 2019 Champions League final to Liverpool, and they finished as Premier League runners-up in 2016-17. Each setback added to a reputation that followed him everywhere: a world-class striker who could not win anything.
By 2023 Kane had run out of patience. Tottenham had finished eighth in the Premier League and faced a season without European football, and his contract had only one year left.
He told reporters his desire to end the search for silverware drove his decision, and he completed a move to Bayern Munich in a deal worth an initial €100 million. Bayern had won 11 straight Bundesliga titles, so most observers believed his first trophy was a formality.
It was not. Kane made his debut in the German Super Cup and watched Leipzig beat Bayern 3-0. He then scored 44 goals in 45 matches that season, a remarkable return, yet Bayer Leverkusen won the Bundesliga title in historic fashion and Bayern finished a season without a trophy for the first time in 12 years. The curse appeared to have followed him to Germany, and critics seized on every missed opportunity.
Kane responded with patience and more goals. He acknowledged that going without a trophy had been difficult, but he insisted he had plenty of years left and had joined Bayern to fix the problem.
In 2024-25 the work finally paid off. Bayern won the Bundesliga, and Kane lifted the first major trophy of his career after 13 years of record-breaking but fruitless effort, scoring 41 goals and adding 14 assists in 51 appearances across all competitions.
That title unlocked the best season of his life. In 2025/26 Kane scored 36 Bundesliga goals to win a second European Golden Shoe and hit 61 goals across all competitions.
He reached his 100th Bayern goal faster than any player in the club’s 126-year history, and he helped Bayern win a domestic treble, including the DFB-Pokal. In Madrid, he also scored a low drive from the edge of the box to win a big European night for the club.
The award carries extra weight because it comes after a disappointing result last year, when Kane finished only 13th in the 2025 Ballon d’Or voting. He has now climbed from there to first, and he is the first Bundesliga player to win the prize since Matthias Sammer in 1996.
For a man once defined by what he had not won, the contrast could hardly be sharper. Kane is a two-time Bundesliga champion, a cup winner, a treble winner and the best footballer in the world. The move that critics once questioned has become the defining decision of his career.
