Hours before the Ballon d’Or ceremony in London, the award’s official website briefly appeared to settle a contest it had not yet formally announced — three different ways.

Reporting focused first on Harry Kane, after a page naming the England captain as the 2026 winner circulated online. One account described the publication as a “major gaffe” but stressed that the result would not be confirmed until the ceremony.¹

The confusion deepened when separate articles naming Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal also emerged. The Kane post said his “record-breaking welter of league and cup goals in 2025/26 has propelled Harry Kane to Ballon d'Or success”; the Mbappé page cited a “record-breaking World Cup,” while Yamal’s article declared him the youngest winner in the award’s history.² All three posts were subsequently removed.

The competing accounts agree that the website published material far too early and that Kane, Mbappé and Yamal were among the leading candidates. They differ chiefly in emphasis: the initial coverage treated Kane’s page as a potentially meaningful leak, whereas the broader account of three contradictory winner stories made a definitive result difficult to infer.

A further report pointed to comparable pages for Lionel Messi as well as women’s-award contenders Alexia Putellas and Ewa Pajor. It said it was unclear whether the articles had gone live accidentally, and whether their removal was deliberate or part of damage control.³

That wider pattern suggests a publishing failure involving prepared winner copy rather than evidence that several outcomes had been decided. Until the official announcement, the brief web posts offered intrigue — but not a reliable answer to who had won.