In time, when Tottenham supporters look back on the Harry Kane era, they will do so with a keen sense of nostalgia.
Kane is Spurs’s greatest-ever player, an academy graduate who defied the odds to become the club’s all-time leading goalscorer and England captain.
What will remain most sharply is memories of his goals, 280 of them in total. Unlike his former team-mates Heung-min Son — with whom Kane shared the most deadly partnership in Premier League history — and Gareth Bale, he rarely scored spectacular, Puskas award-contenders.
But he consistently scored outstanding goals of every type: right foot, left foot, headers, penalties, even sandwiching his nine years as Spurs’s centre-forward with a pair of free-kicks.
Kane was particularly fond of scoring against Arsenal, and leaves Spurs for Bayern Munich as the highest scorer in the north London derby, with 14 goals.
For fans who watched him live, Kane’s time at Spurs will also, though, be coloured with regrets. The fact he never won a trophy with Spurs will sting, of course, and above all there will be an overwhelming feeling that the club squandered his generational talent.
The rot started with the board’s failure to refresh Mauricio Pochettino’s squad and, since the 2019 Champions League final, Kane has only got better as Spurs have progressively got worse, slipping from challenging for the biggest prize to a first campaign out of Europe since 2009-10.
The bitter irony is that many of the club’s misguided decisions over the past four years were made in part to appease Kane.
In appointing ‘win now’ managers in Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, chairman Daniel Levy hoped to capitalise on having one of the world’s best players up front, and find a shortcut to success.
Whatever Levy’s intentions, his plans backfired over and over, and only the most one-eyed fans will begrudge Kane leaving Spurs now.
The 30-year-old has given everything to his boyhood club, never once allowing his standards to slip, even as those around and above him repeatedly fell short.
Kane’s ultimate aim was to win trophies with Spurs, but the club missed their opportunities to build a platform for him to do so. In the end, they failed him.
Kane’s aim was to win trophies with Spurs, but the club missed their opportunities... in the end, they failed him
That is not to say the Bayern deal, worth a minimum of £86.4million, does not make sense for the club in the circumstances.
Levy will reason that it is far better to have Kane safely in Germany and the proceeds in the bank rather than risk the England captain running down the final 12 months of his contract and joining domestic rivals Manchester United or Manchester City for nothing in a year’s time.
A majority of fans will not view the situation so dispassionately; Kane is a one-off and there was a compelling case that the club should not have countenanced selling him under any circumstances, and clung on passionately until all hope of keeping him was lost.
The timing of the deal, on the eve of the new season and the true start of a new chapter under Ange Postecoglou, is also deeply frustrating.
The Australian has never given the impression that he is counting on Kane to stay, and his commitment to a clearly-defined attacking philosophy should ensure his team are far less reliant on individuals than Spurs were under Mourinho and Conte. Regardless, 48 hours before facing Brentford, Postecoglou has been robbed of his primary goalscorer, creator and dressing-room leader, while an enormous cloud has been cast over the club.
Levy, who was subjected to repeated calls to stand down from supporters last season, faces more vocal unrest on Sunday and beyond.
Postecoglou is left to pick up the pieces and may wonder if so much disruption was worth the extra money Levy eventually squeezed from Bayern. If Spurs felt they had to do it, could it not have been done sooner?
Other players will have to step up now, assume responsibility in the dressing room and on the pitch. Losing Kane may, in the course of time, help Spurs to grow as a team under Postecoglou and it at least finally marks a clean break from the past; Son is the only player likely to get significant minutes this season left from Pochettino’s team.
Ultimately, no one is bigger than the club and there will be new heroes for Spurs soon enough. Kane’s departure will be painful, though, perhaps more so than the loss of any other player before him and marks a clear ‘before and after’ moment in Spurs’ rich history.
As he rattles in the goals for Bayern and surely goes on to lift a Bundesliga title, perhaps the Champions League, Spurs supporters will be left to replay his best moments and wonder what might have been.
