Harry Kane becomes the first Englishman to win Germany's Footballer of the Year

Harry Kane has been voted Germany's Footballer of the Year, the award announced on Sunday, 23 August 2026, making the Bayern Munich striker the first Englishman to win it in the award's history. The ballot, known in Germany as the Fußballer des Jahres, is organised by the magazine kicker, but the votes are cast by the journalists of the VDS, the German sports writers' association. Kane collected 272 votes, comfortably ahead of the field, and it is the first time he has won the prize.

The scale of it is in the gap. Michael Olise, his club colleague, finished second on 203 votes, and third place went to Deniz Undav of Stuttgart on 61. The drop from second to third is larger than the combined total of everybody below Undav on the list. One caveat belongs here, honestly stated: the sources disagree on how many journalists voted, with the dpa reporting 656, bundesliga.com citing kicker for 659 and Goal putting it at 695. That is why this article quotes votes rather than percentages.

The vote reads as a plebiscite because the season behind it barely allowed for an argument. Kane scored 61 goals in 51 competitive matches for Bayern in 2025/26, a club figure and nothing wider, since adding his England appearances would produce a different total. He supplied seven assists on top of that, and 36 of the goals came in the Bundesliga, which is where the case for him was built. Those are the numbers the voters had in front of them.

The same season brought him the European Golden Shoe for 2025/26, the second of his career. Kane topped the ranking with 72 points, and Erling Haaland finished second on 54 points from 27 goals. Two individual honours decided by entirely different methods, one a points ranking across Europe's leagues and the other a ballot of German journalists, tend to carry more weight when they agree as emphatically as these two do.

Some context for the size of what Kane has done. The award has been running since 1960, which makes 2026 the 67th edition, and for the first 44 of them, from 1960 to 2003, the winner was always a German. Not once in more than four decades did the ballot go abroad. The first non-German winner was the Brazilian Ailton, in 2004, and the list of foreign winners since then is short enough to recite in a single breath.

After Ailton came Franck Ribéry, the Frenchman, in 2008, then another Brazilian, Grafite, in 2009, then Arjen Robben of the Netherlands in 2010 and Kevin De Bruyne of Belgium in 2015. Robert Lewandowski, of Poland, won it twice in a row, in 2020 and 2021, and Christopher Nkunku, French again, took it in 2022. Kane is the eighth foreign player to win, and his is the ninth foreign title in 67 editions. Two of the eight are Brazilian, and a Brazilian was the first.

It is worth being precise about what 'the first Englishman' means here, because it does not mean England were locked out. No rule ever barred a foreign player from winning, and there is no source that says otherwise: the ballot simply kept going to Germans, decade after decade, until it did not. The award is also broader than its name suggests, since it takes in Germans playing abroad as well as foreigners playing in Germany, which is why Kai Havertz appears in the top eight on 6 votes while playing his football at Arsenal.

Bayern took all three of the day's awards, and the coaching ballot was the least competitive of them. Vincent Kompany was named Coach of the Year with 314 votes out of 653 valid ballots, more than three times the total of Julian Schuster of Freiburg, who finished second on 87. Sebastian Hoeneß of Stuttgart came third with 53. The gap there is even starker than in the players' vote, where at least the runner up finished within touching distance of the winner.

The women's award went to Giulia Gwinn, also of Bayern, on 106 votes, ahead of her club colleague Klara Bühl on 94 and Jule Brand on 82. It is Gwinn's second year in a row as Footballer of the Year, but the first time she has held the title on her own, since in 2025 she shared first place with the goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger. The margin of 12 votes is worth noting too, because it makes hers the one genuinely close ballot of the three.

Kane's first title leaves him a long way from the record holders, and the qualifier matters. Franz Beckenbauer won the men's award four times, which is the record among the men, but not the record for the award as a whole. The women's edition has been running since 1996 and has a history of its own, and in it Birgit Prinz stands on eight titles, twice Beckenbauer's haul. Anyone writing that Beckenbauer holds the record outright is quietly deleting half the competition, and half its winners.

Three awards on one Sunday, all three to Bayern, and a striker who succeeds Florian Wirtz, the 2025 winner, on the roll of honour. What the numbers describe is a club whose season left the German press with very little to argue about, and a centre forward whose case was made in goals rather than in debate. 272 votes from a panel of journalists paid to watch every side in the country is a verdict rather than a preference, and it is the first one of its kind to carry an English name.