Harry Kane is £56.7m no-brainer; he has always been only one rung below Messi

Harry Kane’s German adventure has gone pretty much perfectly to script.

It was always likely that a player who scored Premier League goals for fun in a non-dominant team would find Bundesliga goals in a very dominant team fairly straightforward to accumulate.

And it did always feel like three years would be the right amount of time for Kane to go and trophy-pad his CV. Indeed, just about the only shock from his time in Germany is that if, as seems increasingly plausible, he does return to England next summer, he’ll only bring two rather than three Bundesliga medals back with him to go with the amusingly cannon-shaped goalscorer awards.

Go to Germany, spend three years winning pots and pans while scoring a f*ckton of goals, before returning to England for a few years to complete the formalities of Alan Shearer’s record, and then off to semi-retirement in MLS, possibly while trying to become an NFL kicker on the side. That always felt like the plan.

There’s talk of a pretty reasonable £56.7m release clause Kane can trigger next summer, with Spurs supposedly having first dibs from the deal struck with Bayern, with reports saying the Germans are ‘nervous’ the striker might seek a return to England.

Thomas Frank, who is not an idiot, has said “Yes please, if he’s up for it” while also making clear there is nothing imminent planned.

“I think there’s a lot of Tottenham fans including myself who would like to see Kane back.

“He’s a top player. Personally, I don’t think he will do it right now, if I’m honest, he’ll probably stay in Bayern and continue performing well. But he’s welcome. If he wants to join us, he’s more than welcome.”

So… you’re telling us there’s a chance? The departure of Daniel Levy and increased prevalence of the Lewis family – with whom Kane is reportedly close – is another intriguing little detail here, offering a potential removal of one large obstacle that always stood between Kane and a return to his former club: the fact Bayern pay him £400,000 a week and Levy’s Spurs would never do that.

We do get the distinct impression he’s enjoying superclub life more than he maybe realised he would, but our gut still tells us that Shearer’s record sits prominently on that personal to-do list now he’s finally managed to end the Kane Curse, which did prove more potent than any of us imagined.

He might even get to return to the Premier League as a World Cup winner, at which point he would also, one imagines, be doing so as a pretty hot favourite for the 2026 Ballon d’Or. Which brings us to the one thing that has been slightly curious about Kane’s time in Germany.

We knew he’d do well, we knew he’d score goals, and above all we knew he’d do a lot more than just score goals. Because that’s always who he’s been. What we weren’t quite prepared for was the extent to which people would start behaving like this was some kind of new development.

The realities of the Ballon d’Or is that while it is an individual award, you do still have to play for one of the massive clubs to win it. He was never going to win it at Spurs, and that’s fine. But must we actually pretend he’s improved or developed as a player at Bayern?

Don’t get us wrong, he certainly hasn’t got worse. And there is no sense of age catching up to a player who has never relied on express pace.

But it seems to us he’s just doing all the same brilliant things he did for year after year at Tottenham. He’s always defended like that. He’s always picked the ball up from his own defenders. He’s always had that passing range and technique.

He was never ‘just a striker’ at Spurs any more than he was a one-season wonder. People were dimly aware of this, but when it was just silly Spurs there was always a reluctance to truly accept and acknowledge what was very obvious: that here, in these unlikely surroundings, is one of the very best players in the world.

When Kane, while still at Spurs, spoke of Messi and Ronaldo as the players he was inspired by and to whose levels he aspired, there was mockery. But why? Step back and who else was there in the game for Kane to seek to emulate? He wasn’t as good as those two, perhaps the best two players in the history of the game, but who else in the world was demonstrably better than Kane to the extent he could look up to them?

It’s truly bizarre that it has taken Kane doing exactly the same things he used to do on the regular at Spurs – and still does for England, where far from being appreciated, they often draw actual criticism – while surrounded by better team-mates and weaker opponents for people to finally fully acknowledge what had been so obviously the case for years.

England still don’t. The man has 74 England goals including a World Cup Golden Boot and there is still a reluctance to place him among the true greats of English football, perhaps because none of those goals count. Future generations will watch footage of the celebrations in pubs and beer gardens around the land when Kane was replaced by Ollie Watkins in the Euro 2024 final with genuine bafflement and confusion.

When he returns to the Premier League as he surely will for the couple of years he’ll need to penalty-pad his way past Shearer, whether that’s at Tottenham or elsewhere, he will return as a player perhaps more accurately regarded and rated everywhere else apart from his own country.

And as he’s a player who once scored 30 Premier League goals in a season where Spurs floundered to eighth under Antonio Conte and won the Golden Boot and playmaker awards in a season despite being shackled by Jose Mourinho at his most miserabilist, it’s unlikely that anything he might do upon his return changes the slightly odd perception of a player widely regarded as one of the best centre-forwards of his era yet somehow still weirdly and consistently under-rated and under-estimated.