Did Kooora readers predict Harry Kane winning the Ballon d'Or? The numbers reveal the truth
A roundup of the site audience's comments
Before the big reveal, fans were split three ways: some backed the talent of Lamine Yamal, others put their faith in Kylian Mbappé, and a third camp reckoned Harry Kane deserved to lift the Ballon d'Or.
The winner has now been announced. So how close did Kooora's readers get to naming the man who walked away with football's biggest individual prize?
We opened the floor to readers in response to your requests, inviting you to share your nominations before the official announcement. We promised to return to the comments, compile the predictions and see how closely they matched the final result.
With the race now decided, a look back through the entries reveals a clear split in the public's choices. There's a striking contradiction, too, between the two players who topped the predictions and the name that actually won.
Yamal and Mbappé share the lead in predictions
Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappé topped the list of predictions among Kooora readers. Each picked up 30% of the clear nominations, sharing top spot in the participants' choices.
Readers who rated Yamal the most deserving pointed to his talent and his level. Some were emphatic, describing him as a worthy Ballon d'Or winner with no rival in sight.
Mbappé earned the trust of exactly the same proportion of participants. They backed his goalscoring and his standing among the game's biggest stars, placing him alongside the Barcelona teenager as the two most prominent choices in the readers' predictions.
Together, the pair accounted for 60% of the nominations. That's a clear sign of the divide among fans over who deserved the crown.
Harry Kane: the winner came in third
Here's the twist. Despite lifting the Ballon d'Or, Harry Kane did not top the list of predictions among Kooora readers. He finished behind Yamal and Mbappé on 23.3% of the clear nominations.
The England captain still had his backers, readers who felt he had done enough to compete for the award. One participant pointed to his level for club and country, while another chose him despite supporting Barcelona, proof that technical judgement can trump fan loyalty.
That result lays bare the vote's biggest contradiction. The man who officially sealed the award was not the one with the highest share of the public's predictions. Yamal and Mbappé both finished ahead of him, before the Ballon d'Or went to Kane.
Messi and Hakimi in the readers' calculations
Lionel Messi kept his place in the participants' predictions with 13.3% of the clear nominations, though some comments leaned on an emotional preference for the Argentine rather than a firm prediction.
One reader went as far as to say Messi deserves the award as long as he keeps playing, and even after he retires! Another backed his exceptional standing while offering a predicted order of Yamal first, Kane second and Mbappé third.
Achraf Hakimi also cropped up among the nominations, picking up 3.3% of the clear votes.
What was the proportion of correct predictions?
From the clear comments we compiled, 23.3% of readers predicted Harry Kane would win the Ballon d'Or. The other 76.7% backed different names.
So the majority got the winner wrong, even though Kane featured heavily in the discussion and took close to a quarter of the nominations.
Kooora stresses that these figures reflect the clear comments that could be classified within the scope of participation. They do not represent a full survey of all the site's readers or a measure of Arab fan opinion as a whole.
In the end, the experiment proved that fan predictions can differ from the final result, even with the game's biggest names. Yamal and Mbappé topped the readers' choices. Harry Kane had the final word, sealing the award and giving this interactive experiment its standout conclusion.
