It seems like everyone is feeling sorry for Harry Kane. Beaten last week in the north London derby, on Thursday he was part of a shambolic Europa League defeat –two-nil up, three-two down – that the Spurs captain Hugo Lloris frankly labelled "a disgrace".
Last night he scored his 27th goal of the season from the penalty spot in a dreary win over Aston Villa, but earlier in the day, credible media reports had emerged that Kane has decided the time has come to leave Tottenham. And really, you thought, who could blame him?
There’s just one problem. It’s not up to Kane whether or not he leaves Spurs, because he is still living with the consequences of the terrible career decision he made in the summer of 2018.
Just before England kicked off their World Cup campaign in Russia, Kane announced that he had signed a new contract with Tottenham, worth a reported £200,000 (€232,000) a week.
He had already been the best-paid player at Spurs and the new contract doubled his salary, smashing Spurs’s wage structure in the process.
It appeared that the massive pay deal reflected Daniel Levy's desperation to keep his star asset, who had long been the subject of interest from Manchester United in particular.
But Levy knew that the key detail of Kane’s contract was not the salary, but the expiry date: summer 2024. Players in their peak years typically sign for four years. For some reason, Kane had agreed to sign for six.
Extraordinary term
The extraordinary term reflected Kane's faith in Spurs's future under Mauricio Pochettino. Over the past four seasons he had been at the cutting edge of what was, realistically, the best Tottenham team ever to kick a ball.
They had come close to winning the Premier League and had been unlucky not to go further in the Champions League, for which they had just qualified for a third successive season.
They were due to move into an incredible new stadium which could transform them into the top club in London. Kane had been averaging 35 goals a season for four years and was widely considered to have risen to the level of strikers like Luis Suarez and Robert Lewandowski, a status he was about to underline by captaining England to the World Cup semi-finals and winning the World Cup Golden Boot.
It turns out that signing contracts is a bit like scoring goals: it’s all about timing. It’s not that Kane was wrong to believe in Spurs. Fifty-one weeks to the day after announcing his new contract, he started the Champions League final in Madrid. That Spurs team really was capable of great things. Kane’s mistake was failing to allow for the fact that a club’s direction of travel can change.
He didn’t expect, when he signed for six years, that he would be the only major signing of that summer.
He thought Jack Grealish would be joining but, in July 2018, Villa were taken over by wealthy new owners who persuaded Grealish to stay in Birmingham. Kane would probably have been surprised to know that Pochettino would be sacked within a year and a half.
Maybe he was too dazzled by the prospect of scoring goals in that beautiful new stadium to think about what new stadiums have usually meant for the clubs that have built them: several drab years of austerity.
And he certainly could not have anticipated that as he entered the second half of that contract, a pandemic would have made a quarter of Europe’s football economy disappear.
As a great goalscorer approaching the late summer of his career at a north London club that recently built an expensive new stadium, Kane’s position is immediately reminiscent of Robin van Persie’s at Arsenal in 2012.
You could see it all playing out the same way: the fateful conversation with the little boy within, the “this hurts me more than it hurts you” statement with the apologetic news that he had agreed to join Manchester United, the classy refusal to celebrate the first couple of goals he slammed into Tottenham’s net.
At least, you could see it playing out the same way except for the detail that makes all the difference: in 2012, van Persie had one year left on his contract, while Kane has three.
If Kane had signed a normal four-year contract in 2018, he would be approaching the last year of the deal and he would be one of the most sought-after players of the summer. By signing for six he gave Levy the power to name his price, and it’s hard to see how that price could ever be worth paying.
Free transfers
Levy would want nine figures, and almost nobody has that kind of money in the post-Covid football economy. Barcelona, recently the apex predators in Europe’s transfer food chain, are now scouring the continent for free transfers. Manchester United last week announced a new shirt sponsorship deal worth £17 million (€19.8 million) a year less than the previous deal. Kane would fit into their team, but not at the Levy price.
The few clubs that might have that money are not going to spend it on Harry Kane. Manchester City or PSG could access the funds, but why would they pay £100 million-plus for a 28-year old with Kane's injury record when they could get a 21-year old Erling Haaland instead?
Instead of pining for a move, Kane should recognise that decisions have consequences, and the consequence of his decision to sign for six years in 2018 is that he is probably stuck at Spurs for the rest of his peak years.
Whoever is briefing journalists that Kane has reluctantly concluded the time has come to leave Spurs should be told to leave it. No point annoying the fans when you’ll be playing for them for the rest of your career.
Forget van Persie – the relevant example for Kane are some of his predecessors as England captain: Alan Shearer and Steven Gerrard, who spent their peak years at clubs they knew were not capable of winning the biggest prizes, always insisting with grim determination that there was nowhere on earth they would rather be.
You might not win many medals this way but you do become a club legend, and that’s not nothing. And there’s always hope. It would be silly to repeat the mistake of 2018, and forget that a club’s direction of travel can change.
Spurs might currently be going nowhere under José Mourinho, but the next manager could be better. For now, the best thing Kane could do is accept that he made his bed – now it’s time to lie in it.
