Harry Kane has become the first English player to win the Ballon d’Or since Michael Owen in 2001 after being crowned the world’s best player at a ceremony in London.<\/p>\n
The 33-year-old Bayern Munich striker is the fifth Englishman to win in total, with Stanley Matthews (1956), Bobby Charlton (1966) and Kevin Keegan (1978 and 1979) the others.<\/p>\n
Denis Law of Scotland (1964) and Northern Ireland’s George Best (1968) are the other winners from the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Real Madrid and France forward Kylian Mbappe finished second, while Barcelona and Spain attacker Lamine Yamal completed the top three.<\/p>\n
“Not many people would have thought it, and maybe even I wouldn’t have thought I’d be this far,” Kane told Dazn.<\/p>\n
“I had to go through many ups and downs, especially early in my career. I was never the person that people thought was going to be the superstar like some of the guys now.<\/p>\n
“I had to bide my time and work hard, a lot of times it was me against my own mind and I had to come through it, I had to show self-belief, determination. <\/p>\n
“I think that grounded me even when I did make it at the highest level to keep improving and keep getting better.”<\/p>\n
England manager Thomas Tuchel said he was “delighted” to see Kane win the award as he hailed the forward’s success as a “huge honour”.<\/p>\n
Prince William, meanwhile, said the former Tottenham Hotspur player was a “brilliant captain” and “remarkable player”.<\/p>\n
Kane scored 61 goals in 51 club matches last season, the most a Bayern player has ever struck in one campaign. Including England matches, it was 73 goals – plus eight assists – in 65 matches.<\/p>\n
Only one player at a club in Europe’s top five leagues has ever scored more goals in a season.<\/p>\n
But he wins it despite not lifting either of football’s biggest prizes last season, having lost in both the World Cup and Champions League semi-finals.<\/p>\n
Remarkably the Three Lions captain becomes the first Bayern player to win the Ballon d’Or since Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in 1981.<\/p>\n
To celebrate Kane’s success, the Wembley arches were lit up in gold on Monday night.<\/p>\n
BBC Sport looks at why Kane won it and how unusual it is to do so without securing one of those major trophies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harry Kane has become the first English player to win the Ballon d’Or since Michael Owen in 2001…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gb","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}