Harry Kane is a football superstar who has never known how to act like one. Even now, as he sits in the middle of the biggest quandary of his career, it’s impossible to describe him “putting his transfer woes behind him as he enjoys a jetski in the Maldives” as he never posts pictures of his holidays.
Almost without exception, Kane’s unnatural ability to behave like a reasonable, considerate human being in the midst of an industry embarrassingly obsessed with personal aggrandisement (usually of the financial variety) is an unequivocally good thing. There could not be a better captain of an England team; he embodies not only hard work and perseverance, but the selflessness required in team play, and is a convincing ambassador for the values of humility and compassion that Gareth Southgate advocates off the field. That he’s also the nation’s record goalscorer is a handy boost.
There is an exception though, and it’s one Kane is currently experiencing for the second time in three years. You can’t climb to the top of elite football without, at some point, acting both selfishly and ruthlessly. Or, to put it in more genteel terms, “doing what’s right for myself and my family”. The question in the summer of 2023 is whether Harry might have left it too late.
This week, Kane has let it be known that he wants to leave Tottenham Hotspur to join Bayern Munich. He hasn’t said so publicly, but the information has been authoritatively conveyed to the media as the modern world dictates. So far, so good. Whether he will get his silently expressed wish remains up in the air, however, and whether a transfer to the German champions is what Kane actually needs is another moot point.
The problem with Kane is that he has never won a team title. He has individual prizes galore, golden boots from both Premier League and World Cups, but only a failed tilt at the top-flight title in 2016 (denied by Leicester) and a Champions League runners-up medal (picked off by Liverpool) to put on the cabinet shelf marked “honours”. If Kane goes to Bayern that shelf is likely to fill up with a degree of regularity, the dominant side in German football being, as they are, on a streak of 11 league titles in a row. But will that be enough? Does a couple of winners’ medals you’d have been expected to win add up to the glory that’s deemed lacking from his CV?
The instinct would be to say that it’s likely not enough and with two Champions League titles in the past 20 years, it’s hard to guarantee Munich will deliver the inarguable success that Kalvin Phillips achieved this year with Manchester City. Might Kane want to move his family to southern Germany for the cultural experience of Bavarian living? Again, it’s possible, but doesn’t seem a decisive factor.
Yet at the time of writing Bayern seems like the best transfer available to Kane. Real Madrid are the team you would want to move to if you were him; they have 13 European Cups and 35 league titles and merely hauling on the shirt is some kind of validation. But just days after there was reported interest from the Bernabéu earlier this summer, Kylian Mbappé announced he would not be signing a contract extension at PSG and you could almost hear the Real accounts department working out how many pieces of real estate they’d have to shift in order to get the Frenchman in and clear FFP at the same time. Meanwhile Manchester United, who had previously seemed dead set on Kane, have yet to declare a firm interest in the forward, have just spent £60m on Mason Mount and are in the middle of an unsteady takeover process.
All of that without taking into account the Daniel Levy factor, the Spurs chairman who always gets his asking price, unless he doesn’t, in which case you either linger at the club or do a Christian Eriksen and walk to a team you hadn’t quite had your heart set on joining. Levy is not the sort of man who enjoys selling his best players to domestic rivals, for fear of revealing Spurs’ continued junior status in the league’s ranking of apex predators.
So Bayern it is, and Kane is once again left to rue the moment he let a non-superstar sentiment such as loyalty cloud his judgment and his ability to read a contract properly when he signed a six-year deal with no release clause back in 2018. At that point Spurs were purring under the management of Mauricio Pochettino. Now they are emerging from a season where being described as a rabble would be unfair to rabbles. Bringing in Celtic fans’ messiah Ange Postecoglou and one of the league’s most consistent creators of chances in James Maddison is hardly consolation.
Unless, that is, it might be. A new approach might bring improved performances and if it’s legacy and longevity that motivates Kane, Spurs can still offer that to him. With a side order of the all-time Premier League scoring record to boot. Kane deserves Champions League titles, Ballon d’Or, the lot, and it will surely be a source of regret for him if he doesn’t win them. And maybe that’s the downside of his lack of ego. But being Tottenham’s Harry Kane – legend and goal machine – well, there are worse places to be.
