It surely goes without saying that each player on our shortlist for the 2026 Men’s Ballon d’Or had an exceptional 2025/26 campaign.

Trophies were won. Goals were scored. Clean sheets kept. Consistency and high-achievement have been a prerequisite, with plenty of magic thrown in too.

Across ballondor.com you will find a series of fascinating articles on this very theme, delving into the impressive stats behind each individual’s accomplishments.

But what if all of this data was accumulated? Would that reveal the sheer scale of their collective pre-eminence?

Spoiler alert, it does.

Before we compile the numbers, however, some housekeeping is required.

For all of the data below, only a player’s club commitments have been focused on, across all competitions. Furthermore, only games in which they played 45+ minutes have been accounted for.

Games and durability

Across the 2025/26 season, our 30-man shortlist of nominees competed in a combined 1129 matches for their respective clubs, a testament to their durability.

This does not factor in the numerous times they made late appearances off the bench when rested ahead of important fixtures, or when returning from injury.

The nominee who made the most club appearances last season was Declan Rice and this should not surprise, given that he has made the second highest number of outings in the Premier League since 2018.

With 49 appearances in 2025/26 the Arsenal midfielder just pips Erling Haaland, Luis Diaz, William Saliba and Vinicius Jr who made 48 apiece.

Games won

The natural extension to the stat above is to then ask how many of those games were won. After all, it is evidently beneficial for a team to possess a Ballon d’Or nominee in their ranks. Moreover, considering the calibre of player under discussion here, it is entirely logical to assume that team competes at the summit of their league.

Relegation strugglers boasting a Ballon d’Or nominee as their star player is not unheard of, but is certainly an exception, not the rule.

Subsequently – inevitably, even – the amount of matches won from teams containing one or more nominee is high, a lofty 787 of those 1129 matches.

That’s a win-rate of 69.7%.

Goals, assists and individual glory

Combined, our 30 nominees scored a staggering 437 goals and registered 253 assists across the 2025/26 campaign.

This figure is all-the-more remarkable when it’s acknowledged that nine of the thirty players are centre-backs or full-backs.

Regarding the goalscoring, Harry Kane’s 61 goals for Bayern Munich last term considerably inflates the tally, as too does Kylian Mbappe’s haul of 42 for Real Madrid. Erling Haaland and Julián Quiñones meanwhile fired 38 and 37 club goals respectively.

These four strikers account for 40.7% of the combined total.

As for assists, Michael Olise topped his peers with a substantial 31 for the season. The next highest number was carved out by his team-mate in Bavaria, Luis Diaz (23), closely followed by Bruno Fernandes at Manchester United (22).

Clean sheets and impenetrability

When turning to the art of shutting out opponents we run the risk of succumbing to flawed accounting, given the high volume of attacking players under consideration.

For what it’s worth, the 30-man 2026 shortlist for the Men’s Ballon d’Or contributed to 410 clean sheets combined across last season.

For a more accurate reading, however, it makes sense to omit the 21 midfielders, wingers and forwards on the shortlist and focus exclusively on the defenders.

Here we find that Pau Cubarsi, Marc Cucurella, Gabriel Magalhães, Achraf Hakimi, Marquinhos, Nuno Mendes, Willian Pacho, William Saliba and Dayot Upamecano kept a combined tally of 138 clean sheets from 361 matches last season.

That equates to a shut-out in 38.2% of their combined fixtures.

Match-winners

Scoring a pure match-winner is difficult and rarer than you may think.

To highlight this, one renowned striker on the 2026 shortlist converted 19 goals in 2025/26, a notable tally. Yet none of them were match-winners.

Lionel Messi and Jude Bellingham meanwhile notched ‘just’ two apiece in 2025/26, the latter reserving his for an El Clasico and against Juventus in the Champions League.

This is said to fully illustrate the outstanding output of Harry Kane in this regard, the Bayern ace firing 10 match-winners last term.

The overall, combined tally of 67 from the 30-man shortlist may appear to be inconsequential, but is in fact impressive to the nth degree.