PSG took everyone by surprise and conquered the 2024/25 Champions League, and although their triumph of world football’s premier club competition was marked by a transition to a more team-oriented setup after the departure of Kylian Mbappe, the Parisians still had one of the Ballon d’Or favorites from the campaign in the resurrected form of a more mature Ousmane Dembele.
Every high-achieving club needs at least one superstar to lead the way, and in 2025/26, there’s a wide open slate of contenders of the Champions League crown, whether it’s the defending champions PSG or the competition’s record-holding champions Real Madrid.
So in that spirit, let’s take a preview of what could unfold in the 2025/26 and name every Champions League title contender’s best shot at capturing the Ballon d’Or which, while being an individual honor, still carries with it a certain weight of cachet for the club for whom that players stars.
PSG
PSG might have the most wide open field of candidates for the Ballon d’Or, because there are a handful of players who could legitimately win the honor next season with a big enough showing.
Obviously Ousmane Dembele will be in the mix again after his unreal goal-scoring explosion and all-around brilliance in 2024/25, but fellow winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia proved to be just as influential overall by the end of the campaign after arriving from Naples that winter.
Young sparkplugs Desire Doue and Bradley Barcola are just as talented as those two, and the midfield partnership of Vitinha and Joao Neves played as well as any midfielders in the 2024/25 season.
But ultimately, if the pick has to come down to one, then Dembele edges out his teammates to get the nod again. He is the tried and true star in Paris now, and after being a Ligue 1 and Bundesliga wonderkid turned Barcelona transfer flop, Dembele has come full circle into the skilled, two-footed, and hard-working and composed superstar winger he was ultimately destined to become.
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Real Madrid
Real Madrid fell apart at the seams by the end of the 2024/25 season, going trophyless (nobody cares about the UEFA Super Cup, come on now) and eventually becoming mired in the locker room controversy that pretty much everyone outside the Spanish capital predicted.
Kylian Mbappe got his goals but little else, as his person-centered style of play that held back Paris proved to be just as problematic in Madrid. Yet because he played well individually, Mbappe finds himself with fewer detractors than both Vinicius Junior and Rodrygo Goes, who despite being two-time Champions League winners to Mbappe’s zero, are now the subject of transfer rumors this summer.
While the best players at Real Madrid aren’t actually the forwards – Jude Bellingham and Thibaut Courtois are both far more consistent and helpful to the team than those three – everyone knows that the Ballon d’Or is a glorified popularity contest until proven otherwise.
Therefore, Mbappe is the easy choice. Just like Vinicius got more of a Ballon d’Or push from Madridistas despite the fact that Bellingham was the better player in 2023/24, Mbappe, as the new face of Madrid, will get the same preferential treatment from the club and its many Florentino Perez lemmings in 2025/26.
Barcelona
Whereas Real Madrid are a dysfunctional outfit in serious need of Xabi Alonso to bring down the hammer and clean up their stenching bull, Barcelona were the most well-oiled machine in world football for stretches in the 2024/25 season before ultimately falling to one of the greatest miracle victories in the history of the Champions League.
Funny enough, even though Barcelona were one of the three best teams in European football last season, they were actually pretty reliant on teenage sensation Lamine Yamal, who is so far above anyone else in terms of individual quality that the sheer idea that any footballer today is on his level is absolutely laughable. (But, of course, the average 2025 fan’s IQ is below the level of a mildly sentient computer, so Mbappe is better because he scores more goals, right?)
When Yamal went down in the Fall of last year with an overload injury, Barcelona were losing to lower-table teams in La Liga like Leganes. Yamal is the one who makes everything tick with his willingness and ability to create chances out of thin air, always get to his spot off the dribble despite often facing two or three players head-on, and his quietly emerging goal-scoring prowess.
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Bayern Munich
Harry Kane was the most statistically dominant Bayern Munich star in the 2024/25 season with 26 goals and 8 assists in the Bundesliga, but the best player of their season was actually incoming right winger Michael Olise, who had 27 goal contributions and was at the heart of everything good with the team despite having no real left winger to play off of.
That will change in the 2025/26 season with Bayern spending a whopping 75 million euros on Colombian star Luis Diaz. Like Kane, Diaz is a proven Premier League star coming to Bayern with no resale value, but, also like Kane, he is a world-class player.
Olise will benefit greatly, but so will the actual biggest talent in Bavaria, Jamal Musiala. He had just two assists last season and was actually dwarfed by both Joshua Kimmich and Olise in key passes per game. The problem? Musiala fractured his fibula in the Club World Cup,
So the safest bet is for Kane to rise above, and he’ll have even more scoring opportunities, even without Musiala, as Diaz and Olise on the wings will be a chance-creating machine for the world-class creator and goal-scorer extraordinaire in the middle to feed off.
Liverpool
It’s Mohamed Salah. Easy enough. Florian Wirtz is going to have an incredible season for Liverpool even in his first year in the Premier League, because, as Erling Haaland showed the world, if you are truly of top quality, you will transition from the Bundesliga to any league in the world successfully. And Wirtz is quality.
We are talking about a back-to-back Bundesliga Player of the Season winner who not only finally brought a Bundesliga title to Bayer Leverkusen, but he was the team’s best player and leader on the pitch in an undefeated season – a feat not even Bayern Munich has achieved. Wirtz, in total, has won three Player of the Season awards before turning 23.
Yet Salah is the pick. He is so good that he is arguably the greatest player in Premier League history, and even though he is 33, he is as good as ever because of improved playmaking.
Salah scored 29 goals with 18 assists in the Premier League last season, dominating every other superstar in the biggest league in the world. He could have had more goals and assists, too, if his production didn’t tail off when it was obvious that Liverpool were going to win the league.
That Salah, a right winger with five 20+ goal seasons and a Champions League crown, hasn’t won any Ballons d’Or in his career yet is the only real surprise.
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Manchester City
Rodri is the only player in the history of Manchester City to win the Ballon d’Or, and he will miss the first month of the 2025/26 season with an injury setback after returning a couple of months ago from a torn ACL that robbed him of an encore season to being named the world’s best.
The only other real candidate to be the Ballon d’Or at City – it’s probably too early for Rayan Cherki to be in the mix – is top scorer Erling Haaland, who was controversially voted behind Lionel Messi in his treble-winning season.
Haaland was the difference between Man City getting over the hump in the Champions League, and he is the best pure goal-scorer in world football with a lovely first touch finish and even more otherworldly athletic tools.
The Norwegian superstar had a down year in 2024/25, suffering as the entire team did, but we are talking about a Rolls Royce of a No. 9 with no fewer than 22 goals in any of his five full seasons in a top five European league. And now, the record-breaking single-season goal-scorer in the Premier League is in his prime at the age of 25.
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Arsenal
Bukayo Saka is the most productive player on Arsenal from a statistical standpoint, Martin Odegaard is the captain with a huge point to prove after the way he went out in the Champions League last season, and incoming striker Viktor Gyokeres is hungry to show that his jaw-dropping 38 goals in the Primeira Liga will translate to Premier League success.
But while the Ballon d’Or usually goes to an attacking player, sometimes a defensive player wins, and Rodri’s 2023/24 triumph was a reminder that the voters will consider a more defensive player under the right set of circumstances.
So why not William Saliba? The Arsenal center back is respected and admired throughout Europe, to the extent that Real Madrid’s Florentino Perez has identified the Frenchman as his new obsession on the transfer market.
Saliba is nearly flawless in his position. He is so good at marking, his recoveries to catch up to any striker on the break are impeccable, his tackling is exquisite, his passing is solid, and he can score goals, too. The man is almost the perfect center back, and if this is the year Arsenal finally put it all together, he will likely be the one to receive the most adoration from the Ballon d’Or voters and the wider public.
Joe Soriano is the editor of The Trivela Effect and a FanSided Hall of Famer who has covered world football since 2011. He’s led top digital communities like The Real Champs (Real Madrid) and has contributed to sites covering Tottenham, Liverpool, Juventus, and Schalke. Joe’s work has appeared in ESPN, Bleacher Report, and Sports Illustrated. He also helped manage NFL Spin Zone and Daily DDT, covering the NFL and pro wrestling, respectively.