You might or might not remember this, but Tottenham Hotspur sold Harry Kane to Bayern Munich last summer. It was a whole thing. And since that transfer, Kane has unsurprisingly upped his game to become quite possibly the most prolific scorer in world football, with 57 goals in 54 games, a scoring record that could put him in contention for the Ballon d’Or this coming year.
Yeah, he’s still pretty good.
It’s a slow news week what with the international break going on and all, and Kane has been speaking to the media while on England duty, so let’s talk about Harry Kane. In a recent media interview ahead of England’s World Cup qualifying match against Albania later today, Kane says that his move to Bayern has been a positive step in his development, and that moving to Germany has resulted in his “aura” being increased.
Harry Kane, hippie transcendentalist. Here’s the full quote.
“Just being at a club like Bayern Munich has helped push me on even more, confidence-wise and responsibility-wise. I feel like I’ve definitely got better, I’ve improved, and maybe the ‘aura’ of me as a player is a bit more respected than what it has been in the past, because you’re playing in big games, big nights.
“That’s probably what I mean in terms of being respected more worldwide, on the bigger stage. For something like that, you have to win enough team trophies to be considered in that and probably score 40-odd goals, but that is a possibility this season.”
Now, this is a Tottenham blog and the people reading it are mostly Tottenham fans. And yes, there has already been a little grumbling about this quote potentially denigrating Tottenham Hotspur, which developed him through the academy and turned him into a global superstar. So I suppose I can understand fans getting a little grumpy alluding to his current club as superior to his development to his (unnamed) past club.
But honestly, I think he says it quite fairly here. Bayern Munich is one of the biggest and best clubs in world football. It’s the reason Kane wanted to leave in the first place — he wanted to both win trophies (something he ironically has yet to do in his second year at Bayern) and also test himself at the very highest level of the game. He’s done that. He just did it in a way that indirectly annoyed Spurs fans.
Now I can chuckle a bit about his use of the word “aura” which sounds like something a Zoomer teen would say while arranging quartz crystals in their bedroom and not a 30-year old professional footballer. But it’s hard to argue with the fact that since leaving for Germany Kane has upped his game. I don’t know if he’ll win the Ballon d’Or, but I think he’d definitely deserve it. And it still kind of smarts.
Basically it’s this meme (thanks to Frinkiac.com):
God, I’m bored. I hope Spurs do something worth writing about soon.
