Harry Kane Must Leave Tottenham Hotspur To Match Alan Shearer

In July, Tottenham Hotspur striker Harry Kane turns 30.

For previous generations of professional soccer players, such a milestone would be viewed with dread. If they were lucky, players might get another five seasons, but the role they could reasonably expect to have would be diminished and they might have to drop down a level or two for regular game time.

These days the prospects are less stark, improvements in sports science and the vast sums invested in keeping players at their highest level mean more and more soccer stars are playing at the highest level into their late 30s.

The likes of Sadio Mane and Robert Lewandowski have even earned big money moves and contracts that extend beyond 35-the age the Professional Football Association of England deems appropriate to start handing out pensions.

Nevertheless, Kane must know his time as one of the biggest names in world soccer is limited.

This summer, the Tottenham Hotspur striker will have one season remaining on the six-year deal with the club he agreed back in 2018.

At the time he signed the contract there were few better players in English soccer, the season before he inked the deal he scored an incredible 41 goals in 48 appearances.

He was starting to rack up personal accolades too, that summer he added a World Cup Golden Boot to the pair of Premier League goalscoring awards he already owned.

But the one thing the Spurs star truly craved was to hold a piece of silverware aloft and pocket a medal.

“The main thing is a trophy,” he said at the time. “It’s been about four years now that I’ve been playing at this level and we’re yet to win a trophy.

“I wake up every morning and that’s what I want to achieve. For me personally, though, I just want to improve. Every year I want to get better, to score more goals and to get more assists.”

However, in the five years that followed the glory the Tottenham Hotspur star craved remained elusive.

Near misses, like Spurs’ 2019 Champions League Final defeat to Liverpool or England’s Euro 2020 Final loss to Italy on penalties, only compounded the sense that Kane was somehow cursed never to earn the titles his excellence deserves.

The failure to win silverware came whilst he added further personal achievements, such as becoming both Tottenham Hotspur and England’s all-time leading goalscorer, to his name.

Would You Rather…

Recently a hypothetical question began circulating on social media: would you rather have Harry Kane’s career where individual honors have been achieved without collective success or that of Leicester City star Jamie Vardy who has won both the Premier League and FA Cup?

Opinion was split, but it exposed the shortcomings in Kane’s legacy and you have to wonder what the man himself would say-you’d imagine he still believes he has the opportunity to match the 36-year-old Vardy’s achievements.

Certainly that must have been on his mind when, in the summer of 2021, he sought to engineer a move to Manchester City.

But, locked into his blockbuster six-year deal, any transfer was a non-starter Tottenham Hotspur had no intention of letting its star man depart and didn’t need to.

“[Manchester City] did absolutely everything,” manager Pep Guardiola said of the attempts to sign Kane, “we didn’t talk about Tottenham, not even one offer, because they didn’t want to negotiate and when [only] one team wants to negotiate, there is nothing to say.

“Maybe I would do the same if I had Harry Kane in my team, but he is a Tottenham Hotspur player. I wish him all the best for the rest of his career and doing well in London.”

Following the transfer saga, Manchester City won the Premier League, Kane on the other hand added another year to his trophy-less streak.

Hardly one to sulk, he buckled down and continued banging in the goals, but the sense was he wouldn’t be caught in the same bind again.

Whilst his fellow Tottenham Hotspur talisman Heung Min Son tied himself to a contract extension there has been little prospect of a similar deal with the English striker.

Spurs look in worse shape to achieve the goal Kane set himself five years ago of winning a trophy and, with the summer transfer window approaching, the club is braced for offers for a player with just 12 months to run on his agreement.

The Shearer Legacy

Interest in taking Kane to Manchester is strong again, but this time it is not City but Manchester United eyeing England’s record goalscorer.

This week [24 April 2023], it was reported the club was already doing its due diligence on the player with a view to making him the marquee signing at Old Trafford in 2023.

United might not quite offer the guarantee of medals a contract with the team on the other side of the city has provided in the past few years, but even in United’s worse spells of the past decade, it has won more than the striker.

For Kane’s sake, you have to hope whatever choice the striker makes he is rewarded with some level of success.

The Tottenham Hotspur forward is often compared to Premier League record goalscorer Alan Shearer a man whose 260 strikes are likely to be surpassed by Kane if he stays in the division.

Shearer only won one major honor in his career, the 1994-95 Premier League title with Blackburn Rovers, it is an achievement that secured his legacy which, like Kane, is dominated by personal accolades.

Had he not earned that crown he may not be viewed in the same way.

A loyal servant to his boyhood club Newcastle United it is likely had he ended his career without a trophy, more would be made of his decision to reject his era’s serial winners Manchester United in 1996.

Kane deserves to stand alongside Shearer as one of the league’s greatest marksmen, winning some trophies would put comparisons to players like Vardy, who have not achieved the same standards as him for as long, to bed.