The Ballon d'Or stats model that ranks Harry Kane above Lionel Messi
A Reddit-built statistical model crunching goals, assists and trophies this season puts Harry Kane top of the 2026 Ballon d'Or contenders, with Rodri trailing even Denis Undav, who isn't even nominated.
The 2026 Ballon d'Or will be handed out on Monday night, and the World Cup has made this year's field unusually hard to call, as Planet Football notes.
Spain won the tournament, but their standout player, Rodri, was not consistently at his best for Manchester City across the club season. Lamine Yamal, by contrast, was outstanding for a title-winning Barcelona side yet carried less weight in Spain's World Cup run, according to Planet Football.
That split between club form and international achievement sits at the heart of the debate, with Harry Kane, Michael Olise, defending champion Ousmane Dembele and Lionel Messi all named among the 30-man shortlist.
How the model scores the candidates
A Reddit user going by Codaq3 built a weighted model to compare 12 of the main contenders, as reported by Planet Football. The creator explained the aim was to put the main contenders side by side rather than settle the debate outright.
Codaq3 said the graphic compares "their goals, assists, goal contributions, trophies, all-competition Player of the Match awards and major individual honours," with gold, silver and bronze marking the top three in each category.
The weighting itself is explicit: 40% for combined goals and assists, 20% for Player of the Match awards, 20% for trophies, 12% for Player of the Season or Tournament honours and 8% for Golden Boots, per the breakdown shared by Planet Football.
That structure is a data point, not a verdict. A model built almost entirely around attacking output and silverware will always flatter strikers and wingers over players whose value lies in build-up play, pressing triggers or defensive screening, and Codaq3 acknowledged as much.
Why the top of the table makes sense and the middle does not
The final ranking has Kane leading on 80.0, with Messi second on 74.8 and Olise third on 61.5. Erling Haaland (60.8), Yamal (59.9), Dembele (57.6), Kylian Mbappe (56.5) and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (56.4) round out the chasing group, with Bruno Fernandes, Luis Diaz, Denis Undav and Rodri filling the bottom four places, according to Planet Football.
Rodri finishes last of the twelve on 25.8, below Undav's 33.0 — a player not even among the 30 official nominees. That outcome is less a comment on Rodri's season than on the model's structure, which treats attacking contribution as its dominant input.
Codaq3 was upfront about this distortion, stating that "this ranking naturally favours attackers, which applies to almost all of the listed favourites apart from Rodri," and adding that his "attacking output should therefore be largely disregarded in the Ballon d'Or discussion," while still including him because of his wider influence.
The model also had to account for calendar mismatches. Messi's numbers were recorded only from 1 September 2025 onwards to bring his MLS season into line with the European campaign that frames the rest of the field, a necessary adjustment given how differently the American league schedules its year against Europe's.
What the numbers cannot measure
Codaq3 was clear that the exercise has limits, noting that it "cannot fully account for tactical roles, defensive contribution or the context behind individual performances," and that it treats every league and every trophy as equally weighted when they plainly are not.
That caveat matters most for a player like Rodri, whose value to both Manchester City and Spain has rested on positional discipline in deep midfield and his reading of transitions rather than goal contributions. A system built on goals, assists and Player of the Match tallies was never going to capture that kind of defensive and structural influence.
It also explains why a weighted model can produce a defensible result at the top — Kane ahead of Messi — while simultaneously producing an indefensible one in the middle, with an unnominated player like Undav outscoring a World Cup-winning captain.
Planet Football's own view, built on its running power rankings through the season, lines up with the model's headline finding: Kane as the man most deserving of the award. Whether the actual voting panel reaches the same conclusion will be known when the ceremony takes place on Monday night.