You might hear a lot about bottling, about shirking, about being scared of the challenge in the next few days.
If Harry Kane decides that he wants to stay at Tottenham, after The Athletic revealed they have agreed a fee with Bayern Munich worth around £86million, then the takes will be piping hot.
And, in some respects, they will be right. It is easy to wonder what he’s playing at. Kane has ostensibly been trying to leave Tottenham for a while now, the struggle to get Daniel Levy to even sit down with a prospective suitor becoming a seemingly annual dance.
Now, finally, someone has persuaded Levy to not just talk but actually accept a bid, so if he now turns Bayern down, it’s worth wondering why he even let it reach this stage. If his intention all along was to run his contract down and have his pick of clubs next year, why did he or his camp not make all of that clear before? Is this a complex, long-form prank? Is Kane secretly a huge Borussia Dortmund fan and has just enjoyed a summer of yanking Bayern’s chain?
This, in theory, is the move he has been angling for. An elite club, surrounded by elite players who have won the last 11 league titles, and Borussia Dortmund’s final day bottle job last season suggests there’s not much standing in their way of a 12th. You could say that their absolute domestic dominance means a Bundesliga wouldn’t mean all that much for Kane’s legacy, but Bayern will already have been among the favourites to win the Champions League anyway — with Kane, even more so.
This represents a chance to show he can score goals away from his comfort zone. To try something new, a new league, a new country, new surroundings.
But all of that doesn’t mean this is the right move for Kane, at this moment.
For a start, as things stand he has a binary choice. Tottenham or Bayern. While the German giants are an attractive destination, they are also his only possible destination at the moment. Everyone else either doesn’t have the space in their team, doesn’t have the money to pay the transfer fee, doesn’t have the inclination to get into lengthy negotiations with Spurs or Spurs won’t countenance talking to them.
If he waits a year, he will have much more choice. Real Madrid could be keen. PSG too. Bayern might still be an option: you may think that turning them down now would burn bridges, but grudges tend to disappear pretty quickly if a generational striker is available for no transfer fee. Other openings may well emerge by then.
In short, he will have much more choice, and perhaps crucially will have options to stay in the Premier League. Manchester United could be one, a chance to listen to the little boy inside him and do a Robin van Persie. Chelsea, if he’s planning the ultimate heel turn, would trip over themselves to sign him.
That could be attractive for a range of reasons, not least that he is currently 47 goals short of Alan Shearer’s Premier League goalscoring record. Unless something goes awry, he will be in touching distance of that in 12 months time. It feels like a slightly flimsy basis on which to make a big career choice on, but these things do matter, particularly since the next active player on that all-time scorers list is Mohamed Salah, who is 31 and currently on 139 goals: if Kane surpasses Shearer and beats a path towards 300, he’ll almost certainly hold the record for quite a while.
Staying in England could be attractive for more human reasons too. His wife, Kate, is due to give birth to the couples’ fourth child imminently, which is another reason why he might not want to make a quick dash to Germany right now. We are too quick to think that players only choose which club to play for based on money or footballing prestige, but there are much worse reasons for making a huge life choice like this than whatever will make your family the happiest.
Money is also going to be a factor. Bayern would not exactly pay him a pauper’s wage, but if he’s available on a free transfer next summer then he is in a strong position to demand a healthy signing on fee from whoever wants him, plus probably a higher salary too.
He may get some abuse for running down his Spurs contract and thus denying them a transfer fee. But after ten incredible years, over 200 goals and arguably being their greatest ever player, certainly of the Premier League era, the idea that Kane owes Spurs anything is pretty funny.
And so, we wait for Kane to make his decision.
He might have started the summer thinking that Bayern was the place he wanted to be. Now, faced with the reality of it, he might have changed his mind. And that’s fine. It happens all the time. Thinking something one day, then the opposite the next is not a moral failing, it’s just what people do.
It would, for those of us who secretly enjoy a good transfer saga, be a pretty underwhelming ending to this one. But Kane turning Bayern down this summer would be a perfectly understandable human decision.