Harry Kane spent a decade as one of the best goal scorers alive and lost every final he ever played in. So he transferred to Bayern Munich, a team that had won its league 11 years in a row, to finally win something. Bayern won nothing that year. Tonight he won the Ballon d'Or, which is basically the MVP of all of soccer. Getting there took one of the worst runs of luck I've ever seen from a player that good. With Tottenham he lost the 2019 Champions League final to Liverpool, plus two League Cup finals. With England he lost the Euro 2020 final at Wembley to Italy on penalties, then lost the Euro 2024 final to Spain three years later. He scored 280 goals for Tottenham, more than anyone in the club's history, and left with zero trophies. Bayern was supposed to be the cheat code. His first game was a 3-0 loss in the German Super Cup. Then Leverkusen went the entire league season without losing once, Bayern finished third, and people started calling it the Kane curse, only half joking. His first trophy finally came in May 2025, when he was 31. A few months later he finished 13th in the Ballon d'Or voting despite scoring 41 goals, which is usually where a player's story settles into "great, but never quite there." The voting rules were working against him too. Back in 2022, France Football, the magazine that runs the award, stopped letting voters consider a player's career, so only the most recent season counts now. Fifteen years of goals and heartbreak earned him zero extra votes. He had to win it off one season. And he did. He scored 61 goals in 51 games for Bayern, a number only Gerd Müller has beaten at that club, and Müller is pretty much the Babe Ruth of German soccer. He won three trophies, including a hat-trick in the cup final. Then he scored six more at the World Cup, where England had their best finish in 60 years. That's 73 goals in 65 games, all in. He still didn't win either of the two trophies that usually decide this award. Bayern went out in the Champions League semis and England went out in the World Cup semis. Every winner between Messi in 2019 and tonight had won a Champions League or a major international tournament that same year. Kane just scored so much that the voters ran out of reasons to give it to anyone else. Watch his face in the clip as Ronaldo Nazário reads the name. Rodri turns to congratulate him, and his Bayern teammate Michael Olise reacts in a way you almost never see from him. Kane looks tight, almost braced, like a guy who's watched enough endings go wrong that he won't believe this one until it's over. He's the first Englishman to win it since Michael Owen in 2001, and it only took him 15 years and a move to Germany.