The Daily, 19th July 2023
Harry Kane's silence is the most interesting thing about the Harry Kane transfer saga.
There is something fundamentally fascinating at the heart of the Harry Kane Transfer Saga Part II, which is the sight of a very large number of people scrabbling and scrambling, trying to make the future arrive faster than it wants to arrive. Everybody—but everybody—seems to have an opinion on what he should do next, but there has remained a vacuum at the heart of this story which has been filled with the very best galaxy-brained opinions.
And everybody has their own, utterly self-serving way of looking at it all. Support a big club with red shirt, creaky guttering in the main stand and a sense of entitlement over the best players? Probably best to set aside all those years you spent diminishing anything he did on the pitch and start talking up how inevitable it is that he should want to win All The Trophies (which might turn out in reality to be a League Cup or an FA Cup in a couple of years, presuming that Manchester City have a moment in one or the other) or the prospect of having a statue of him built outside your crumbling stadium (and definitely not receiving a dog’s abuse from all arond the world should he not immediately reach the level that they—stomp stomp—feel they—stomp stomp stomp—deserve). And you can already feel the bristling fury, should he end up deciding not to go there. Perhaps he heard some stories from Harry Maguire about how players are treated there if things aren’t going so well.
For the moment, it seems to remain the case that if he is to leave Spurs this summer it will be to go abroad, but Bayern Munich have managed an achievement of sorts in coming across as even more insufferably arrogant than Daniel Levy or even Very Online Manchester United supporters on social media. Indeed, the absolute certainty of noted tax evader—let’s hope he doesn’t start trying to claim some sort of moral highground, eh?—Uli Hoeness that Kane will be going to Munich this summer if anything feels like exactly the sort of attitude that will put Levy’s back up and make a sale even less likely.
As has been repeatedly stated elsewhere, Levy doesn’t hold many cards in this particular game of poker, but one of those that he does hold is the ability to deny whatever offer Bayern Munich make this summer. It is very strange that Hoeness should be acting in a way that, if anything, only makes the idea of Tottenham actually wanting to do business with them, and it would certainly be quite funny if they missed out on him because they couldn’t maintain a reasonable sense of decorum after having done what might have been considered to be the difficult bit of persuading him to move to Germany in the first place.
Meanwhile, the amateur sleuths and psychologists of social media have been deciding what Kane wants on the player’s behalf since even before the Manchester City transfer debacle of 2021. “He wants to win trophies” (as though there are armies of professional footballers who don’t). “He’ll never win anything at Spurs” (at the moment, it’s becoming increasingly likely that he’d only win anything at Manchester City). You know the drill.
The truth remains that it is this silence that is the most fascinating thing about Harry Kane. It may well be that the sound going on in his head may be that of a toy monkey bashing two cymbals together, but he is clearly not built like other footballers in terms of his priorities. It is known that he values loyalty to an uncommon degree. We also know that he’s a father of four whose previous career earnings ensure that he doesn’t need to worry so much about the size of the pay cheque being dangled in front of him, although as the recent Premier League exodus to Saudi Arabia has confirmed, there are plenty of players who are happy to set aside any moral or ethical considerations for the opportunity to trade up to a bigger yacht.
But beyond that, nobody knows at the moment. Not me. Not you. Not that keyboard warrior with a Qatar flag on his Twitter account who’s never been within 3,000 miles of Old Trafford. Not that tabloid hack who needs to come up with six SEO-friendly headlines on the subject by lunchtime. It’s perfectly plausible that even Kane hasn’t quite decided what he wants just yet. But it’s absolutely guaranteed that every single other person who considers themselves invested on this ever-tedious subject already does.
As an aside, some of you may have been wondering why I haven’t really said anything about the Women’s World Cup yet. Well, the short answer to that is that you’re going to get better preview coverage of that elsewhere, but that I am still considering how many matches I will end up covering or live-blogging. I’ve been running a little close to burnout speed recently, but I think regular readers will already know that this would be unlikely to prevent me from being stationed by my laptop for three or four games a day for the next few weeks.