It seems like it might actually happen this time. Now, I won't believe it until I see it, but all the signs are pointing toward Harry Kane playing for a team other than Tottenham come the beginning of the season.
Earlier this month, my colleagues reported that Kane, who has a year left on his current contract, wasn't planning on signing a new deal with Spurs. Then, last week, my colleagues reported that Tottenham owner Joe Lewis told chairman Daniel Levy that they needed to either extend Kane's contract or offload him before the season started.
This, of course, isn't how contracts work. Spurs can't just transfer Kane; he has to agree to a move, and if he wants to stay with the club until his contract runs out, he has every right to do so. However, my colleagues also reported that Kane would be open to a transfer if the right situation presented itself. Bayern Munich have aggressively presented themselves with multiple transfer bids -- neither of which have yet met Tottenham's reported valuation of more than £100 million. Manchester United are monitoring the situation, and Paris Saint-Germain could soon be without Kylian Mbappe as well as Lionel Messi, leaving a neat, Kane-shaped hole they might consider filling.
Kane will demand plenty of interest. He's been one of the best players in the world, and at the sport's premium position, for a decade. But he also turns 30 later this week.
If Kane does switch clubs, what can his new team expect? And for just how long should they expect it to last?
The evolution of Harry Kane
Tottenham's Ange Postecoglou reacts to a reporter wearing a Harry Kane's Bayern Munich jersey.
In 2017-18, it seemed like we'd seen the ultimate version of Kane -- both because of what happened then, and what happened soon after. He scored 30 Premier League goals for the first time in his career -- and just two of those came from the penalty spot. His 28 non-penalty goals were also a career high. And he did it, mainly, by living near the penalty area and producing an absurd number of attempts on goal.
Kane took 181 shots that season. Across Europe's Big Five leagues, only Messi (193) attempted more. But if you strip out free kicks and penalties, Kane led all of Europe in the number of shots attempted from open play. These are all of them, sized by the expected-goal value of each attempt:
Courtesy of TruMedia/Stats Perform
He was as traditional as a traditional No. 9 can get: find space in and around the penalty area, get the ball, let one rip, and then do it all over again. But then, all of a sudden, the shots disappeared. Seemingly because of an ankle injury picked up late in the 17-18 season, followed by a quick turnaround time for the World Cup in Russia, Kane had lost the physical capacity necessary to produce the 5.3 shots per 90 minutes from 17-18. His shot production declined in consecutive seasons, 3.6 per 90 in 18-19 and 2.8 the year after that. And along with it went the goals; he scored 29 non-penalty goals, combined, over those two seasons.
Since Kane was something of a "one-dimensional" player -- get lots of shots, score lots of goals -- who'd specifically declined in that one dimension, he was simply a much worse player after the World Cup.
The DAVIES model, created by the analyst Michael Imburgio, looks at everything a player does with the ball and estimates how much value all of it provided to his team. In 2017-18, his play was worth 10.6 goals more than the average player at his position. Across Europe that season, only Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Mohamed Salah, Luis Suarez and Lorenzo Insigne graded out better by the DAVIES assessment. In the following two seasons, though, Kane's production eventually halved: 5.5 goals above average in 2018-19 and then down to 4.0 in 2019-20.
That's still an above-average player; it's just not Harry Kane, England's superstar.
Today he is, once again, that superstar. In 2020-21, that goals-above-average number rose up to 8.6, then to 8.8 the following year, and 8.9 this past season. In Europe this last year, only Mbappe, Messi, Robert Lewandowski, Salah, Antoine Griezmann and Erling Haaland produced more value, per the DAVIES model.
However, the way he's helping his teams win has drastically changed. Yes, he scored 30 goals (25 non-penalty) again this past season, but after he turned 27, Kane suddenly became one of the most creative No. 9s in the world. The shots have never bounced back up to anywhere near the heights of 2017-18, but he's posted expected-assist numbers -- the rough value of all the chances you create -- of 7.1, 9.0, and 7.0 over the last three seasons after averaging just 3.3 over the three seasons before that.
This comparison of Kane's statistical outputs from 2017-18 and this past season does a nice job of showing just how much he's changed:
Courtesy of FBcharts, Powered by Opta via fbref
The shots have dropped off and so have the touches inside the penalty area -- but there's been a massive increase in the number of expected assists, progressive passes, and just passes in general. In order to remain one of the best players in the world, Kane redefined his game and started doing all of the things he'd never done before.
But what comes next?
The above all speaks incredibly well of Kane. Despite a borderline-concerning and publicly stated obsession with scoring goals, his evolution suggests otherwise. He could have just camped out at the top of the penalty area, continued to rip shots and probably dragged Spurs down with him. Instead, perhaps, he realized he couldn't maintain the pace he'd set for himself in 2017-18, so he started dropping deeper and influencing the game with his passing.
And it's not like you can just decide to do that. Most shot-getting strikers will make their teams worse if they drop away from the goal and start attempting to do something that they're not good at. However, Kane has almost perfectly calibrated the balance between how often he needs to drop deep to aid buildup and how often he needs to break into the box and get shots for himself. I'd credit his coaches for this, but well, he's continued to do it across all of Tottenham's ongoing managerial mishaps. Outside of his inability to press, this is a player who you can fit into any attacking system without worrying about any kind of imbalancing effect across the rest of the field.
It's just ... how much longer can we expect it to last?
For attackers, 30 years old is right around the time when we expect them to begin to decline. And the risk with paying a massive transfer fee to acquire Kane is that you're devoting resources toward the player's past performance, rather than what he's likely to do for you moving forward.
These are the 10 most expensive transfers for attackers aged 30 and older to a Big Five league, per the site Transfermarkt:
1. Cristiano Ronaldo, 33, Real Madrid to Juventus: €117 million
2. Robert Lewandowski, 33, Bayern Munich to Barcelona: €45 million
3. Gabriel Batistuta, 31, Fiorentina to Roma: €36.2 million
4. Sadio Mane, 30, Liverpool to Bayern Munich: €32 million
5. Chris Wood, 30, Burnley to Newcastle: €30 million
6. Diego Milito, 30, Genoa to Inter Milan: €28 million
7. Nikola Kalinic, 30, Fiorentina to AC Milan: €22.5 million
8. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, 30, AC Milan to PSG: €21 million
9. Antoine Griezmann, 32, Barcelona to Atletico Madrid: €20 million
10. Philippe Coutinho, 30, Barcelona to Aston Villa, €20 million
The only unadulterated success on that list is Ibrahimovic to PSG, where he totally dominated for four consecutive seasons. Ronaldo didn't improve Juventus; if anything, he made them worse. Mane's first season in Germany was a disaster. Wood doesn't play for Newcastle anymore, and the less said of Kalinic and Coutinho, the better. Griezmann, meanwhile, had one of the best seasons of his career for Atletico on loan last year, but we also have his disastrous move to Barcelona in between, and he was quite poor for Atletico the season before last.
However, the three I didn't mention all have something in common -- and might provide some instructive information for whoever decides to make Harry Kane their new center-forward.
We've only seen one Lewandowski season with Barcelona, but he led LaLiga in goals and they won their first league title since 2019. He also didn't help with their Champions League issues, and he represents a massive short-term investment for a team that had to sell off its future earnings, in part, to fund his arrival. All context aside, Lewandowski was a win-now purchase, and he did help Barcelona win.
Batistuta did the same thing in Rome: he scored 19 non-penalty goals, and Roma won their first (and last) Serie A title since the early 1980s. He scored nine non-penalty goals the following season and was gone midway through the next season. Milito, meanwhile, scored 18 non-penalty goals in Serie A and the winner in the Champions League final en route to a famous treble for Inter in 2010. He then scored five non-penalty goals the following season, before bouncing back up to 16 and then back to six and then two.
All of those moves worked because flags fly forever and all that. But if you just isolate the individual performances of Milito and Batistuta over the length of time that they were initially acquired for, it doesn't look great. Plus, we don't know if a younger player couldn't have also helped those teams win the trophies they've won, while also providing high-level performance for many years beyond that and potentially more trophies in the future. We'll see what happens with Lewandowski, but that all applies to him, too.
Another way to look at all of this is that only one attacker (Zlatan) over the age of 29 who was signed for at least €20 million in the history of the sport has provided more than two seasons of high-level, winning performance. That's the success rate that any team signing Kane needs to be working with as their baseline.
So maybe that's why Bayern Munich make the most sense. They've already turned their league into a version of Ligue 1; in fact, it's even less competitive than Ligue 1. They've won 11 straight league titles; PSG have only won two in a row.
Acquiring Kane would mainly be a move for Bayern to become more competitive in the Champions League once again. They haven't been past the quarterfinals since winning the abbreviated version of the tournament in 2020. They'd really only be relying on Kane to come up big for the seven potential games you'd play in the knockout rounds of the Champions League.
From Kane's perspective -- beyond the pay raise and a chance to play for a team competing for major trophies -- he'd be joining a league that is typically very kind to attackers. On average, we'd expect a player moving from the Premier League to the Bundesliga to see an increase in their attacking output. That would help Kane stave off some of the incoming age-related decline. That decline, though, is inevitable, and it's likely coming some time soon.
We're in an era of superathletes, across all sports, who maintain high-level performance well into their 30s. Could Kane be one of them? He's already shown an incredible ability to modify his game to match his physical capacity. And while he did suffer through what seemed to be an injury-related dip in play, he's rarely missed much actual game time. Since the start of the 2014-15 season, he's played 26,302 league minutes -- more than any other attacker across the Big Five leagues and more than every outfield player other than Villarreal midfield Dani Parejo and Inter Milan defender Francesco Acerbi.
All of which creates the conundrum that only really exists because of the way the silly market for soccer players functions: Harry Kane has been one of the most consistent attackers in the world for a decade, but any team that signs him this summer is going to be taking a pretty big risk.