Harry Kane goes into Tuesday's Ballon d'Or shortlist announcement as bookmakers' favourite following a prolific season for club and country, but history suggests individual goalscoring form alone rarely secures football's top individual honour. Since the award began in 1956, success in major tournaments – particularly the World Cup – has consistently shaped the outcome, meaning Kane, who has never finished higher than 10th, faces a well-established pattern working against him.

Analysis of past winners shows that in World Cup years, the award has almost always gone to a player who lifted the trophy or reached a final, from Raymond Kopa in 1958 through to Ronaldo in 2002 and Luka Modric in 2018, with a 2016 France Football retrospective concluding that several earlier winners should really have gone to World Cup champions such as Pelé and Garrincha. More broadly, only four of the last 19 Ballon d'Or winners triumphed without lifting the Champions League, World Cup, European Championship or Copa America that year, exceptions largely limited to the exceptional cases of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.