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Achraf Hakimi finished 13th in the 2026 Ballon d'Or. The ceremony, the 70th edition of the award, was held in London on Monday 26 October, and the Moroccan right-back was the highest-ranked African in the men's top 30 — seven places below the sixth-place finish he recorded a year earlier, and still the best placing by any defender from the continent in the award's history. Four days after the ceremony, he answered the ranking the only way a footballer can: with a hat-trick and two assists as Paris Saint-Germain beat Le Havre 5-1.
The headline number is 13. The story behind it is everything a full-back is not supposed to be.
Thirteenth in the world, first in Africa
Harry Kane won the 2026 Ballon d'Or, taking 1,055 points to beat Kylian Mbappé by 28, with Lamine Yamal third, Rodri fourth and Lionel Messi fifth. Hakimi's 13th place put him above Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior and Lautaro Martínez — and above every other African on the list. Sadio Mané, the only other African in the men's top 30, finished joint 29th, a long way from his runner-up finish in 2022.
Among defenders, only one player in the world finished above him: Barcelona's Pau Cubarsí, who took 12th. Hakimi was the second-highest-ranked defender in the voting, ahead of Marc Cucurella (18th), Willian Pacho (20th), Gabriel (21st), Nuno Mendes (23rd), Marquinhos (25th), Dayot Upamecano (26th) and William Saliba (29th). Three of those are his own Paris Saint-Germain team-mates. In fact, Hakimi was PSG's fourth-highest finisher overall, behind Ousmane Dembélé, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Fabian Ruiz — all of them in the top 10 — and ahead of Vitinha (14th) and João Neves (19th).
The ranking also made history in a quieter way. According to the statisticians at Stats Foot, Hakimi is now the first African defender to finish inside the world's top 15 in two separate editions of the award: sixth in 2025, 13th in 2026. No defender from the continent had done it once before he did it in 2025. He has now done it twice. The full African scoreboard from the ceremony — Hakimi 13th, Mané joint 29th, Temwa Chawinga 10th and Barbra Banda 18th in the women's award — is set out in Sportblot's Ballon d'Or scoreboard piece.
The season behind the ranking
The Ballon d'Or is judged on a season, and Hakimi's 2025-26 was the most productive of his career. The award's own profile of him records 49 matches, four goals and 17 assists across all competitions, with a Champions League title, a Ligue 1 title, a UEFA Super Cup and an Africa Cup of Nations in the honours column. In Ligue 1 alone, FBref records 18 appearances, 15 starts and 1,375 minutes, with two goals and two assists. In the Champions League he played 13 matches and scored once.
Those numbers understate the role. Under Luis Enrique, Hakimi is not a defender who occasionally attacks. He is a right-sided attacker who starts from right-back, carrying the ball into central areas, overlapping into the box and taking set pieces. The 17 assists in a single season — a figure no full-back in Europe's top five leagues matched in 2025-26 — are the point: the Ballon d'Or voters were not rewarding a defender for defending. They were rewarding a player who creates goals at the rate of a winger while still playing in defence.
The honours list behind the ranking is now long. Hakimi has won four Champions League titles — two with Real Madrid in 2017 and 2018, two with PSG in 2025 and 2026 — and seven league titles across Spain, Italy and France: La Liga in 2017, Serie A with Inter in 2021, and five consecutive Ligue 1 titles with PSG from 2022 to 2026. He turned 28 on 4 November, two days before this article was published, and he is contracted in Paris until 2029.
A full-back who scores like a winger
If the 13th-place finish felt like a slight — seven places down on 2025 despite a Champions League title, a league title and a World Cup quarter-final with Morocco — Hakimi's response was emphatic. On Friday 30 October, four days after the ceremony, he scored a hat-trick and provided two assists in PSG's 5-1 win at Le Havre. He scored in the 28th, 55th and 69th minutes, created goals for Mika Godts and Senny Mayulu, and was directly involved in all five PSG goals before being substituted in the 71st minute. It was the first hat-trick of his professional career.
The performance was not an isolated burst. This season he has three goals and three assists in 12 appearances in all competitions — all three goals coming in that one night at Le Havre, the third assist in the 4-2 Champions League win at Barcelona on 20 October — and he started again on Tuesday 3 November as PSG beat Villarreal 6-0 in the Champions League. PSG have won nine matches in a row in all competitions and sit top of Ligue 1 with 20 points from nine games.
The contract and the money, honestly labelled
Hakimi joined PSG from Inter Milan in July 2021 for a fee reported at €60 million. In February 2025 he signed a contract extension running to June 2029, a deal that ended any speculation about a move and made him, by the reporting around it, the highest-paid full-back in world football. The salary figure most commonly reported is around €14 million net per season. That figure is Reported, not Disclosed: neither PSG nor the player has published the terms. His estimated market value is put at around €80 million. That is an Estimate, from the transfer market, not a price anyone has paid.
The extension matters for what it says about PSG's project. The club has reportedly turned away transfer interest in Hakimi, and he is now one of the senior figures in a side that has won back-to-back Champions Leagues. He is not a player being shopped. He is a player being built around.
Morocco: captain, champion, and a title still in dispute
For Morocco, Hakimi is the captain, and the numbers are stark: 102 caps and 12 goals, three World Cups — 2018, 2022 and 2026 — and a run to the quarter-finals at the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico. He captained Morocco to the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations title on home soil, and to the 2025 FIFA Arab Cup.
But the AFCON title is not yet formally settled, and honesty requires saying so. The final against Senegal ended in chaos: the referee disallowed a Senegalese goal and awarded Morocco a penalty in the 90th minute, Senegal's players walked off in protest, and CAF later ruled that Article 82 of its regulations — refusal to play as a forfeited match — had been breached, declaring Morocco champions. Senegal appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and that appeal is still ongoing. The title is Morocco's for now. It is not yet final.
The fallout reached Hakimi personally this week. On 4 November, CAF handed him a two-match suspension, one match suspended for a year, for his conduct during the final — attempting to remove Senegal goalkeeper Édouard Mendy's towel in the rainy conditions. Senegal head coach Pape Thiaw received a five-match ban and a $100,000 fine, midfielder Ismaël Saibari a three-match ban and a $100,000 fine, and the Moroccan federation a $200,000 fine. CAF has not clarified whether Hakimi's suspension applies to CAF competitions only or to FIFA competitions as well, which leaves a question over his availability at the start of Morocco's next international window. It is a suspension, not a scandal — but it is part of the record, and it belongs in any honest profile.
What the ranking means for African football
Hakimi's 13th place is the African ceiling right now, and it is worth being precise about what it is and what it is not. It is not a snub: he finished above players with bigger reputations and bigger goal tallies, and he did so as a defender, the position the Ballon d'Or has always undervalued. It is not a peak, either: his sixth place in 2025 remains the best finish by an African defender, and at 28, with a contract to 2029 and a PSG side winning everything, he has time to go higher.
The wider picture is that Africa's best individual player is a full-back, and that says something about where the continent's football is strongest. The goals come from the wings and the flanks as much as from the centre. The next marker is 7 December, when the CAF African Player of the Year award is presented: Hakimi won it in 2025, the first defender in 52 years to do so, and he is the favourite to retain it.
George Weah remains the only African to have won the Ballon d'Or, in 1995. Hakimi is not Weah, and a full-back will probably never win it. But he has done something no African defender has ever done — twice. The ranking says 13th. The numbers say he is the best full-back in the world, and the closest Africa has come to the top of the list since Mané in 2022. The Le Havre hat-trick says he has not finished making the case.
Sportblot will carry the tracker from here: Hakimi's season, week by week, in the same format as every other African abroad — minutes, goals, assists, and what they actually mean.
