The Real Madrid Ballon d’Or nominees for 2026 are confirmed, and there are four of them. Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Junior, Jude Bellingham and Marc Cucurella all appear on the 30-man shortlist published by France Football on Tuesday afternoon — hours before Los Blancos open their Champions League campaign against Inter Milan at the Santiago Bernabeu.
The four Real Madrid Ballon d’Or nominees
Paris Saint-Germain dominate the list with ten representatives, while Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have four apiece, Managing Madrid reports, with the nominees chosen on merit across the 2025/26 season.
Mbappe is the spearhead. He was top scorer in both LaLiga (25) and the Champions League (15) before a World Cup in which ten goals earned him the Golden Boot and made him the tournament’s all-time leading scorer. Vinicius, nominated for a fifth time, registered 22 goals and nine assists last season according to Mundo Deportivo.
Bellingham’s inclusion owes more to the summer than the season. Eight goals in a stop-start club campaign would not have been enough on its own, but Madrid Universal notes he scored seven at the World Cup as England finished third. Cucurella, meanwhile, is nominated for work done elsewhere: he was at Chelsea last season and joined Madrid this summer having won the World Cup with Spain.
Why this year is different at Valdebebas
The genuinely new part of Tuesday is that Real Madrid said something. As Marca details, the club posted the four names on its official channels and ran a story on its own website. Last year it did neither — no nominees, no results, nothing, on the night Ousmane Dembele collected the award.
The silence dated to 28 October 2024, when Madrid learned Vinicius would not win and did not travel to Paris. Rodri took the prize after a season in which the Brazilian had won LaLiga and the Champions League. The club’s verdict was blunt: from that moment, it said, the Ballon d’Or ceased to exist. Almost five hours of planned RMTV coverage was scrapped. Two years on, the freeze has thawed.
Mbappe: “Who do I vote for? For myself”
Nobody is campaigning harder than the man himself. Speaking in a France Football interview trailed on Monday, Mbappe said he believed he could win it this year and had not distanced himself from the idea. Asked who gets his vote, he was direct: “Who do I vote for? For myself.” He added that he understood those who see it differently, since “we are not in a dictatorship of thought”, and that when he weighed up the competition he did not think a win would be a robbery.
He was more measured at his pre-Inter press conference. “When you play for Madrid, people associate you with this award,” he said. “I have made a lot of history this summer and I have good feelings, but people have to vote.” On the criticism of his defensive work, and comparisons with Dembele and Raphinha, he could play dumb and note that he outscores them, he said, but it is a debate without end.
Courtois, Diomande and a London gala
Two more Madridistas are up for individual honours. Thibaut Courtois is on the ten-man goalkeeper shortlist, as we covered in our piece on Courtois’ Yashin Trophy nomination, and club-record signing Yan Diomande is in the running for young player of the year — see our story on Diomande’s Kopa Trophy shortlist place. Felicia Schroder, the new Real Madrid Femenino forward, is nominated in the same category.
The winners will be announced on 26 October at the 70th edition of the ceremony, staged in London rather than Paris for the first time, in tribute to Sir Stanley Matthews, who won the award in 1956. Elsewhere on the list, Lionel Messi returns for the first time since 2023, while Cristiano Ronaldo, Mohamed Salah, Pedri and Raphinha all miss out.
Before any of that, there is a football match. Jose Mourinho’s side face Inter on Tuesday night — kick-off details are in our Real Madrid vs Inter Milan guide. Mbappe has an argument to make on the pitch as well as in the papers.
