Harry Kane was still more than a fortnight from joining Bayern Munich when his prospective employers’ president, Herbert Hainer, attempted to take a look at the bigger picture. “Here in the Bundesliga we don’t have many international stars any more,” he said. “He would do us and the Bundesliga good.”
Officials monitoring the TV ratings on Friday, when Kane is expected to make his full debut at Werder Bremen, are unlikely to disagree. Germany’s top flight will be appointment viewing on the campaign’s first night just as it was on the final day of 2022-23 when Borussia Dortmund allowed Bayern to steal in and win an 11th successive title. Eyeballs, clicks, intrigue: on the surface, the Bundesliga will pick up roughly where it left off.
How long will the renewed sense of glamour last? Perhaps it depends on the time Kane takes to hit his straps: with a week’s training behind him there is every chance Werder, who finished three points above the relegation zone in May, are blown away by an attack that has a top-class fulcrum for the first time since Robert Lewandowski’s departure and that the tone is set for a season-long procession.
Make no mistake, those in the league’s corridors of power are right to trumpet Kane’s £100m arrival. In isolation it is, once parochial lamentations about the Premier League’s loss are dismissed, hugely necessary for the Bundesliga and European football as a whole. The English game’s stockpiling of wealth and, as a damaging consequence, talent has rendered all bar a handful of continental clubs poor relations. Poaching the England captain, 30 years old but showing scant sign of slowing up, issues a reminder there is still more than one show in town.
It is a grand statement from a club used to making them, but in the broader context it barely plants a finger in the leaking dam. RB Leipzig spoiled the narrative in the Super Cup on Saturday but they must rebuild after selling their two best talents, Dominik Szoboszlai and Josko Gvardiol, to Liverpool and Manchester City in the past six weeks. A third, Christopher Nkunku, knew since last December that he would be joining Chelsea in June.
Dortmund’s push for the championship was all the more remarkable given Erling Haaland’s departure for City a year ago but while the Premier League vultures have held off this pre-season the loss of Jude Bellingham to Real Madrid was a fresh reminder of their place in the pecking order.
Bar the 25-year-old Nkunku, all of those players are 22 or under. The brightest talents arrive early like Haaland, Bellingham and Jadon Sancho, but tend simply to pass through. Players’ finishing schools tend not to register heavily in the popular consciousness in the scramble for a worldwide fanbase. Players do not see out their best years in Germany nowadays unless given the chance to do so at Bayern, whose resources and glamour make them a special case. In signing Kane, they have given themselves a fresh dimension while their would-be rivals have both weakened. No other Bundesliga club would offer Kane realistic hope of a Champions League medal this season.
None of which is intended to denigrate a league that, inside almost every stadium, offers a more inclusive and vibrant experience than its English counterpart. It has the highest average attendance in the world and tickets remain largely affordable.
Whether in Dortmund, Darmstadt or Heidenheim, Kane will be accessible to a broader social demographic than the one that experienced his heroics at Spurs up close. Open training sessions, anathema to Premier League clubs, are far from unknown at Bayern’s Säbener Straße base. Even if Hainer is correct that the Bundesliga lacks stardust, its core product remains sufficiently authentic and confident to provide a worthy stage for those who arrive.
Time will tell whether Kane’s arrival has any kind of ripple effect, although in the medium-term that would require a seismic shift in football’s financial structures. More immediately, there is an inalienable truth: Bayern intend him to make the Bundesliga less competitive. Julian Nagelsmann, Oliver Kahn and Hasan Salihamidzic were among the casualties of last season’s close call, when they scraped home on goal difference; Bayern had won the league by fewer than eight points on one of the previous 10 attempts.
The expectation is that Kane will reduce that jeopardy and facilitate a more concerted tilt at European honours. Their hold on such a storied local league does not go unnoticed across the continent at a time when many of football’s existing structures feel up for discussion.
Ensuring Bayern can compete with City, who beat them easily in the quarter-finals last season, would undoubtedly make the Champions League more interesting. In today’s climate, where everyone outside England increasingly has to take whatever they can get, that would be framed as an advance for the Bundesliga. It is also, for those taking in a wider perspective, the endgame for Kane’s move and its best case scenario.
Few would doubt that he is good enough to improve Bayern’s prospects at the elite level, but it will surely be asking too much for him to smack more than a sticking plaster on the uncertainties faced by their domestic competition.
