Kane, Bellingham and Maddison strike a blow for the old-school mavericks
All the best romantic comedies, most notably the late golden era of romcom at the turn of the century – just as the genre began to collapse and become decadent – tend to include a highly formalised moving-on montage.
This short interlude depicts the main protagonist growing, maturing and learning to live again after hitting rock bottom via some traumatic, partself-induced romantic breakup.
A series of tasks must be fulfilled to achieve this. Watching a black and white movie in oversized glasses and a jumper. Walking in Central Park kicking leaves with a kooky friend. Carrying the grocery bags of an elderly neighbour, who somehow also lives in a spectacular shabby-chic Manhattan studio block. Frowning at a painting in a deserted art gallery before walking home in the rain and making soup, watched by a wise dog on a window sill.
To the casual observer of Harry Kane’s early weeks at Bayern Munich, his progress consumed mainly in clips and highlights, there is something in the rush of scrolling images that has felt a bit like a classic personal-growth movie montage. Here we have a footballer in a rare spell of form and, more to the point, apparently having the time of his life.
It’s not just that Kane’s goals have come in a flood. It’s also the way he has been scoring them, with a sense of gleeful impatience, as though simply trying to clear the pitch of balls, tucking one away into the nearest corner, embracing the nearest delighted German man, then rushing off to do it all again.
Kane scored twice in midweek against Galatasaray, the first a flickheader from a whipped free-kick, the kind of header that makes the net thunk in a deeply satisfying way; the second a close-range finish after Kane had won the ball.
He has 19 in 15 games for Bayern, with seven assists and three hat-tricks. He’s living in a £10,000-a-night suite at the Four Seasons with six TVs and two marbled bathrooms. He’s free to stroll around the delightful cobbled glory of the Altstadt. The kids are at home. You can drive 170mph on the Autobahn.
This is basically the best stag weekend ever, the one where you never have to leave, and instead get paid vast sums to be the best footballer in the country and have pork knuckle with horseradish on room service whenever you want. Kane even looks slightly different, the transition from mild, frock-coated Victorian bank clerk complete. He looks square-jawed. He looks modern. He looks German. Asked for his thoughts in midweek, Kane said: “I’m really happy.”
Something has shifted in his game, too, and not just since he went to Munich. There is a sense of a footballer who has levelled up, who is now that guy, the one who simply never stops scoring. Kane has 39 in his past 34 games for Spurs, Bayern and England combined, more than Erling Haaland or Kylian Mbappé. He looks like a player in a perfect state of balance with his role and his physical capacities, in the first really dominant team of his 13-year career.
There are two things worth saying about this. First, it is a strange kind of relief – this is football – to get this confirmation that Kane is unarguably, a very, very good elite footballer. That line of conversation can evaporate for good. This week the German press called him “the most efficient striker in the world”. Manuel Neuer called him “a phenomenon”. A Bayern director compared him to Gerd Müller, but with one caveat: Kane is a more complete player.
Perhaps his time at Bayern can also kill off the enduring Kane paradox. Here is a footballer who contributes relentlessly, but who is still chided for being somehow a trophy-drag, as though it is Kane’s fault his career has been spent with Spurs and England, two teams who don’t win things, but who have got a little closer in his time.
The ideal end note would be a Champions League final in London in June. It is possible. Bayern look potent now with Kane in front of a Coman-Musiala-Sané trident. It’s also not impossible that England could do well in the Euros next summer in Harry Kane’s Germany. If both these improbable things happen Kane may even win the Ballon d’Or. This is not, repeat not, very likely. But it is at least possible, where previously it wasn’t. This is progress.
There is one other thing worth noting. At this moment, a snapshot in time, English football is responsible for producing the current best player in the Bundesliga and the current best player in La Liga. Perhaps we could also chuck in the fact that until last weekend James Maddison was arguably the player of the season in the Premier League.
There is an interesting common quality in these three players, born in the decade between 1993 and 2003, and products of the EFL as much as the Premier League. That quality is a certain fine-margins outsiderdom at elite level. Kane, Jude Bellingham and Maddison are not standard-issue academy products. Kane learned a lot during spells in the Championship. Bellingham has a shirt waiting for him at Birmingham. Maddison came through at Coventry.
If there is a criticism – and Arsène Wenger made this point recently – in the way elite academies produce players it is the absence of a little raggedness, a more inventive kind of creativity. Kane is being hailed as an unusually intelligent footballer in Germany for doing some fairly old-school positional things very well. Bellingham has surprised us by doing stuff that has fallen out of elite midfield fashion, showing rare spontaneity in his movement and decisions, and also a bracing sharp edge in the middle of all that systems football.
Maddison has a sense of the maverick about him too, even if what he does is some way short of Matt Le Tissier on acid; more a case that, in the valley of the highly technical footballer, the slightly more home-schooled highly technical footballer is a very useful point of difference.
This is, of course, a small sample size. The chemistry of a move can change quickly. Kane and Bayern have a job on their hands just winning the Bundesliga. But if he does make a romantic return to England at some point it seems likely it will be as a more sated footballer; perhaps even in some kind of late-blooming glory.