Ballon d'Or Website Mistakenly Published Three Articles Naming Kane, Yamal and Mbappe as Winners

Just hours before the lights went up at the London Palladium, the Ballon d'Or itself got ahead of the script. And not by a little: three separate articles appeared on the award's official website, nearly at the same time, each naming a different player as the winner.

First it was Harry Kane, in a piece titled "Harry Kane wins the 2026 Ballon d'Or" that ran through his goal-scoring season with Bayern Munich. Minutes later, another article popped up claiming Lamine Yamal had become the youngest winner in the award's 70-year history. And as if that weren't enough, a third piece celebrated a supposed win for Kylian Mbappe, pointing to his sustained top-level form with Real Madrid.

It all happened roughly two and a half hours before the gala's scheduled start, which was more than enough time for screenshots to spread across social media and for suspicions to take hold that someone, somewhere, had leaked the result early.

An explanation came quickly from France Football, the organization behind the award. According to them, profiles and announcements had actually been prepared in advance for each of the nominees, ready to go live the moment the real winner was confirmed. The problem was that, by mistake, several of those drafts were uploaded to the site well before they should have been.

Some nominee profiles prepared by BallonDor.com were accidentally published online. These articles had been prepared for all nominees and should in no way be considered an indication of the results or the final ranking.France Football

All three articles were eventually taken down, though by then it was too late: the screenshots were already circulating among fans tracking the award minute by minute.

Kane took home the real award

In the end, far from any leak, it was Harry Kane who claimed the 2026 men's Ballon d'Or, while Alexia Putellas won the women's category. With this win, Kane becomes the first Englishman to take the award since Michael Owen in 2001. Mbappe and Yamal, for their part, remained among the top contenders of this edition, the first to be held in London. Yamal, just 19 years old, had hoped to break the award's youth record, while Mbappe was chasing his first Ballon d'Or after another prolific campaign with club and country.

The episode, though it ended up as a last-minute footnote before the ceremony, made clear just how thin the margin can be between the editorial preparation of an event this size and the risks of publishing too soon.