According to France Football editor-in-chief Vincent Garcia, speaking on the sidelines of Monday evening's award ceremony, only a few votes separated the Bayern Munich striker and the Real Madrid forward.
"This year, there were several serious contenders. The two closest rivals were the two front-runners, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe, and the race between them was decided by a very small margin," Garcia explained.
The gap was even smaller than in the previous closest result, in 2024. Manchester City midfielder Rodri beat Real Madrid's Vinicius Junior by just 41 points that year. "The battle for first place was incredibly close between Kane and Mbappe this year," Garcia said.
For a while, the French 2018 world champion looked likelier to win, but Kane pulled ahead again in the final stages. "I followed the results in real time during the month of voting. Kylian led for a long time, but Harry Kane came back into contention, and in the end it was decided by a very, very small number of points," Garcia added.
The FranceFootball editor-in-chief kept his own vote secret: "You should wait until it is published to find out, because I ask the jury members not to disclose their votes before the magazine comes out, so I won't do that either. I voted for someone who did not win, and I think he would have deserved it too."
Getty ImagesBallon d'Or: Did Kylian Mbappe and Lamine Yamal talk themselves out of contention?
Unlike Kane, who had remained guarded about his chances, Mbappe and Lamine Yamal, who eventually finished third, had repeatedly attracted attention in recent weeks by publicly singing their own praises.
Whether that cost Mbappe votes is hard to say. Former Ballon d'Or chief Pascal Ferre, though, recently said he considered such overt self-promotion a serious mistake.
"The voters are not naive. They have both the experience and the judgement needed to assess and evaluate a player without having to hear ten or fifteen times that he is the best," he told the French newspaper Le Parisien.
Ferre also worked on organising the award ceremony and was once editor-in-chief of France Football, the French football magazine that awards the Ballon d'Or.