Poor Harry Kane. It just couldn’t happen to anyone else, could it?
After years and years of jabs and jibes about your trophy-dodging and pot-avoiding and dark talk of maybe even some kind of a curse, you sit down and triangulate and manage to conceive of and complete what is surely the perfect move. Bayern Munich. Absolute sweet-spot club for your needs. The optimal meeting point of legitimate European superclub but also one that operates in a one-club league where you always win the title and quite probably something else besides.
It was without doubt the least tinpot combination of club and league he could join while still being apparently guaranteed to win something. There was a trophy up for grabs in his very first game, for goodness’ sake.
Alas, Bayern came second in that one. And barring a couple of really quite striking course corrections from themselves and Bayer Leverkusen they’re also, for the first time in more than a decade, going to finish second in the Bundesliga.
Kane may not be able to win things, but he’s unmatched in the field of finishing second. The German Supercup and most likely Bundesliga runners-up gongs will join an impressive collection that already includes the Champions League, the Premier League, the European Championships and most prestigiously of all the Carabao.
And now the manager who brought him to Germany to finally end The Curse has instead become its latest victim. Bayern have announced that Thomas Tuchel is leaving at the end of the season, a move so emasculating you could cringe out a lung in embarrassment for the fella. A Champions League-winning manager reduced mid-season to the role of interim boss to stop Liverpool having a clear run at the manager who has made all this possible, Xabi Alonso.
Of course, Tuchel himself had already identified the problem with Bayern’s stuttering title challenge and his own upcoming loss of station, and that problem is none other than Mr Harold Kane and his embarrassingly meagre return of just 25 goals in a whopping 22 appearances.
Time to take the hint, Harry. This move ain’t working, time to make another one. But what move? To where? Here are what we reckon to be his main options…
Go back to Spurs
An obvious one, but not without its charms. Just fully George Costanza it, pretend you never left. Just turn up for pre-season at Hotspur Way and bluff it out if you need to. In time, they’ll be singing about you being one of their own again, your season in Germany no more significant in the grand scheme than those loan spells at Norwich or Leyton Orient or Millwall. All will be forgotten. Sure, you give up on ever winning trophies but never mind that. Acceptance of who you are and where you’re meant to be is good for the soul.
Plus there’s a rich recent tradition of beloved attackers returning to Spurs for a second spell. Jurgen Klinsmann even did it after leaving for Bayern Munich. Jermain Defoe did it, Teddy Sheringham did it, Robbie Keane did it even quicker than Kane might, Gareth Bale did it. It might even add to the legend if he’s lucky. A couple of years of Angeball boots-filling won’t bring trophies but should, with a following wind, bring Alan Shearer’s Premier League goals record within range. And for Kane that has really always been the real quiz.
Go to Chelsea
The equal and opposite of option one. The Wario to its Mario. The Oppenheimer to its Barbie. The salt-the-earth option. Even in their current dire straits, Chelsea remain a likelier trophy-winning option than Spurs, if Kane is still pretending he might be able to win something somewhere one day, and at least a trophy with Chelsea wouldn’t be met with “well done, they’d have won that anyway” like anything he might do at Bayern always would have.
Plus there’s a reasonable chance that his old mate Mauricio Pochettino might even still be there next season given the recent upturn in both results and performances. It would completely destroy his Spurs legacy and place him in Sol Campbell territory, especially as joining Chelsea via a year at Bayern would unavoidably look like deliberate machinations he’d planned all along even if it wasn’t, but at least he’d also be back in London, back in the Barclays, and once again able to resume that Shearer pursuit.
Go to MLS
Harry Kane’s love of all things American, especially that fancy dress rugby they like to play in between adverts and concerts, is well known and this one will almost certainly be the final move of his playing career, but would it be the next one at this early stage? Probably not just yet, but couldn’t be entirely ruled out.
Kane is not quite as good a footballer as Lionel Messi, sure, but he’s still pretty good and we’ve seen it still doesn’t take an awful lot for one player to make a dramatic difference to an MLS side. He might well win something, and even if he doesn’t it still tees him up for what we all know is his true destiny once he’s had enough of the soccer pot-dodgery: a very public and very doomed bid, probably with an accompanying Netflix documentary, to switch codes and become an NFL kicker.
Go to PSG
Not many players capable of filling the Kylian Mbappe-shaped hole that’s about to appear in the perennial Ligue 1 winners’ squad, but Kane is certainly one of them and surely, surely, surely not even he can stop them winning pots and pans in France. Surely. If nothing else, it would be riotously entertaining to watch him try to once again scuttle a previously unstoppable team via his unusual, nay unique, method of ‘scoring loads of goals and being really quite strikingly good at football’.
Go to Celtic
The nuclear option if he remains wedded to this idea of winning a trophy, any trophy and removing the banter monkey from his back. They’ve won 12 of the last 13 Scottish titles, five of the last seven Scottish Cups and six of the last seven Scottish League Cups. They’ve done the domestic treble five times in the last seven seasons. We’re not about to embark on tired bashing of Scottish football, but at the same time the general standard there is what it is and Kane would, conservatively, score about 80 goals a season and we know how much he enjoys scoring goals.
