Hunch. Since 2018 the BBC has put only six people in the final vote, against 10 to 16 in the earlier years we looked at, and Kane himself came third that year.
The second or third place market resolves on the BBC Sport report of the 2026 show: YES if it names Harry Kane second or third in the public vote, and NO if he wins, finishes lower or is not on the final list. If the BBC page does not open, Guardian and Sky Sports reports of the same night settle it together.
We looked for cases where a British sports star won the top world prize of their sport and stood in the BBC vote of the same year. We counted from 2006, when a panel began to pick the final list, and used six world prizes, from football’s Ballon d’Or to cycling’s Vélo d’Or. We found four such years, from 2012 to 2017. Chris Froome, a cyclist, stood in two of them.