Football journalist and author Guillem Balagué discusses the impact of Harry Kane at Bayern Munich and how the forward has exceeded expectations.
Mauricio Pochettino told me something about Harry Kane that has stayed with me. That early in his career, Kane needed to be given confidence. That he was not the finished article in terms of belief (of fitness or quality or understanding of the game).
What happened next says everything about the man. Pochettino asked for money to be spent somewhere else as with Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado, Kane could become the third striker. Expectations were zero. Kane listened and once he understood the path to the top, he literally moved closer to the training ground, shaped his body, shaped his mind, and got to work.
And that absence of noise from the start may be the single reason the world took so long to recognise what he is.
We live in an era where Ballon d’Or votes are partly won on social media, on spectacle, on the suggestion of greatness as much as greatness itself. To be recognised as a superstar today you have to be loud. You have to demand attention. Kane never did any of that. He just got better. And while the football world was busy crowning others, Kane understood that he was losing pace and that he had to develop another part of his body — the brain.
Seven times on the Ballon d’Or shortlist but never higher than tenth. The numbers are almost comic because of their regular excellence, except they tell you something real about how the football world judges a certain kind of excellence.
That first shortlist in 2017 featured Buffon, Ramos, Falcao, Cavani, Aubameyang. Kane has outlasted every single one of them. Only Mbappé and Lewandowski appear on both that 2017 list and the one being compiled now in 2026. That is a career of extraordinary longevity and consistency, and still the recognition lagged behind the reality.
Harry Kane Ballon d'Or odds
He is also England’s all-time top scorer. That fact tends to get lost in club football’s noise, but it shouldn’t. No Englishman has ever done what he has done for his country — and he did it while carrying a Spurs side that never quite gave him the platform his numbers deserved.
Those who worked with him, though, always knew. They were saying then what everyone is saying now.
A lot was expected of him, but Kane has exceeded all expectations.
That's significant praise coming from Bayern legend Lothar Matthäus.
Marco Neppe, Bayern’s technical director at the time of his signing, described to Sky Sports what Kane brought to the dressing room beyond goals: “With Harry in the dressing room, you know as a player that this is someone who can change the whole match in a second. Because he is a goalscorer and he does not need five metres to do it, just a second, just a situation and he scores.”
And Luis Díaz, who sees him every day in training and alongside him in matches, went furthest of all: “I don’t think there’s currently another striker like him. He scores goals, he provides assists, he runs, he goes out on the pitch and pings you a pass from 30 yards away. He does everything — and mentally, I think he’s very strong as well. I’ve learned a lot from him in that respect. He always wants to win, he always wants to help the team. Having a player like that gives you a feeling of assurance.”
On mental strength. There is a scene in the All or Nothing documentary about Spurs where Jose Mourinho accuses the players of not having the right attitude. There is a silence that suggests a bunch of things: better let the manager talk, we don’t want to accuse anyone of anything, we don’t particularly like that the manager is talking like this when there are cameras around, he is probably doing it to impress the future audience, etc. And then Harry Kane takes the context away and focuses on what is important and starts talking about what the team is not doing, mostly not running enough for each other. The right words, the leader speaks.
The kind of things Luis Díaz or Neppe and Matthäus say are not traits people say about a goalscorer. They are things people say about a complete footballer. And that is the evolution — not just in Kane’s numbers, extraordinary as they are, 136 goals in 133 games for Bayern, on course for the European Golden Boot, finally in race with Mbappé, Desiré Doué, Vitinha or Lamine Yamal for the Ballon d’Or — but in the world’s understanding of what he actually does when he is on a football pitch.
Because Kane is not, and has not been for some time, a centre-forward in the traditional sense. His heatmap tells the story. The majority of his touches take place in the space between the halfway line and the edge of the opposition box. He drops deep, draws defenders out of position, plays precise diagonal balls wide quarterback-style, and creates space for teammates by occupying exactly the wrong kind of attention at exactly the right moment. He ranks in the top ten in the Bundesliga for through-balls and big chances created. Not the numbers of a poacher. Not the profile of a man waiting in the box for the ball to arrive.
Matthäus framed the transformation well: “He was brought in as a goalscorer to fill Lewandowski’s role, but Kane is so much more than that for the team.” Defenders who face him confirm what the statistics suggest. Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, the young English centre-back on loan at Cologne from Manchester City, was asked by The Times about the experience of marking Kane and said: “It is hard because he drifts so deep. When he is up top, hopping around, we can shuffle across and manage him — but when he drops into that deep space and he is flying balls left, right and centre, it can be a problem.” A problem, that is one word for it.
Nowhere was this version of Kane more visible than in the UEFA Champions League quarter-final first leg against Real Madrid in Madrid. By the way, before the game I told him: you were always going to play. Actually no, he said. It was touch and go. The ankle was real trouble — he had been barely training in the days before, managing it session by session, telling almost nobody how bad it actually was. That is the other thing about Kane that never quite makes the headlines — the quiet refusal to make his own difficulties the story. He strapped it up, said nothing publicly, and played. Of course he did.
And in the semi-final first leg against PSG, the same player, the same approach. On the surface, the numbers were tidy — a goal and an assist. Look closer and you see the game’s
real architecture. The central dynamic of the match was the relationship between Kane and Musiala, Bayern’s 9 and 10 working in constant combination, Kane dropping deep to create space, Musiala driving into it, a passer and a dribbler in permanent dialogue. It was Kane’s movement and pass that created the Díaz goal that kept Bayern within touching distance at 5-4. Without the ball, both pressed PSG’s centre-backs aggressively from the front, and when that press was broken, Kane and Musiala dropped compact to protect Bayern’s shape, closing the central lane, sandwiching any PSG player attempting to find space between the lines. A full shift, in both directions, across 90 minutes, in a Champions League semi-final.
Bayern topped the UEFA Champions League charts for final-third recoveries going into that game — 76 across the competition, an average of 6.3 per game, over a quarter of them leading directly to attempts on goal. They pressed PSG man-to-man from the first minute, leaving a 3v3 at the back. Kane was central to that aggression. This is what Matthäus meant when he said the Kane of today is a completely different player to the one Bayern signed two years ago, but the transformation started really when Pochettino convinced the club to keep him.
He came to Bayern without a trophy. That narrative followed him across the Channel like a shadow. Then came the DFB-Pokal last season — his first major honour, finally, at 31, and league titles. Now a Champions League final is within reach. The nearly-man story is being rewritten in real time.
The goals were always coming. The rest of it — the pressing, the playmaking, the defensive discipline, the leadership — was explained to him during that era and that has grown into something exceptional.
And now here we are. The semi-final second leg against PSG to come. A World Cup beyond that. The Ballon d’Or requires a Champions League medal or a very good World Cup. Both remain possible. What is already certain is something rarer than any trophy: Kane has made the football world feel embarrassed for underestimating him. Not through complaints or campaigns. Just through the relentless, quiet accumulation of evidence. 748 professional games to get here. The verdict was always going to be the same. We just weren’t paying attention.
