As the audience filtered out of the London Palladium at the 2017 Best FIFA Awards, Harry Kane lingered at the back, staring at the stage. The scene before him was a scramble for selfies and autographs from adoring fans catching a close-up glimpse in person of the FIFPro World XI, which that year included Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
Kane has aspired to be considered in the same breath as the game’s greats for years. English football sometimes has a habit of overhyping its own, but Kane invited those comparisons out of a relentless desire for self-improvement. In the 2020 “All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur” documentary, Kane told then-manager Jose Mourinho that “when you’re at a club like Tottenham, of course we’ve done well, and personally, I’ve done well, but I want to be Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi,” holding his hand out flat and high up to indicate a level he felt he was yet to reach.
This is his motivation for moving to Bayern Munich. It wasn’t the money—sources have told ESPN that Spurs were willing to offer him a package comparable to the £400,000-a-week wage he will earn in Germany—but the chance to win silverware and cement his status as one of the finest players of his generation.
His transfer to Bayern, formally completed on Saturday morning, brings to an end a long-running summer saga in which the deal lurched from improbable to probable with a dramatic twist right at the end. Here is a look at how and why one of the summer’s landmark deals came to pass.
His decision to give an interview to Gary Neville’s “The Overlap” show in May 2021 fired the starting pistol for a summer of speculation over his future, given he placed on record his aim of a “good, honest conversation” with chairman Daniel Levy while expressing his desire to play “in the biggest games, the biggest moments.”
Manchester United and Chelsea registered an interest — the latter seemingly undeterred by the fierce London rivalry with Spurs — but sources have told ESPN that Kane’s clear preference was to join Manchester City that summer.
Leave a Reply