The tendency always is to oversimplify, to try to find one person to blame: if only he had acted better, if only he had done his job properly. But it is rarely about that – or rarely just about that. The agency of individuals should not be denied. Harry Kane and Daniel Levy have played their parts in the continuing saga of the forward’s proposed move to Manchester City. But this is also about wider economic forces.
Over the past week or so the majority of the focus has been on Kane. Already there is a sense his reputation has been sullied by the saga, distaste at his reluctance to train heightened by the fact that he is the England captain – as though wearing the armband meant that, like Billy Wright and Caesar’s wife, he must be above suspicion.
It is unedifying for a player to go, in effect, on strike to force a move but, equally, it is probably not worth being too sanctimonious about it (if that is what Kane has done; he denies it, saying he is returning as planned). Kane has seen Luka Modric and Gareth Bale take similar action to secure moves away from Tottenham.
To point out that nobody would behave like this in another business is true but largely irrelevant. This is not some other business: a footballer cannot simply give his three months’ notice and in other businesses employees’ registrations are not traded for millions of pounds. A footballer does not have the option of idling away until pensionable age; rather, he has a window of, if lucky, a decade near his peak and any time lost or wasted in that is critical.
Nor is the fact Kane signed a six-year contract in 2018 as decisive a point as many seem to think. It is true that gave him security if he suffered serious injury but it also gave Tottenham security; nobody would be talking potential fees of £160m now if he had one year remaining.
Just as significant as what is written in the contract are the verbal agreements that go alongside it. One can argue that Kane and his agents were naive not to have everything in writing as Jack Grealish did. But it is equally naive to believe certain assurances will not be given alongside a contract that it is in neither parties’ interest to set down: in terms of squad investment and, perhaps, allowing a player to leave if a bid of a certain value is made by a club of a certain stature. When Kane signed that deal, the expectation would not have been for the chaos of the past two years or for Spurs to finish seventh in 2020-21.
That is not to say Kane would necessarily be right to leave, rather that Tottenham are just as much the authors of this situation – they and the sport’s strictly stratified financial structure. It is also not obvious that Levy’s resistance to the sale – his fabled tough negotiating style – is making the situation any better.
The sale of a totemic player does not have to be a negative. Eight times in the past 50 years a club have sold a player for a world-record fee and gone on to win their domestic title or the Champions League the following season. But not all clubs are equal in this regard: Barcelona (who account for three of those examples) or Juventus (two) can sell a big name and nobody doubts they are a big club. Tottenham do it and there are suddenly concerns that they are a selling club. A rising talent sees Ronaldo leave Barcelona or Paul Pogba leave Juventus and thinks there is a vacancy for a new hero; he sees Kane leave Tottenham and he begins to wonder how ambitious the club really are, whether that Champions League final in 2019 was a temporary blip of promise.
Tottenham have been burned by this before, squandering a sizeable chunk of the money they received for Bale. That said, there has probably never been a better time for a club to have a sudden windfall (assuming Tottenham are able to use the bulk of any Kane fee for transfers): the pandemic means clubs across Europe are desperate to lighten their wage burden. There are bargains to be had.
Clubs such as Liverpool and Leicester have used big sales to fund acquisitions that have helped them develop. It is possible but requires a coherent scouting and recruitment department. Whether Tottenham have that is debatable and, if Kane is sold, this will be a major test of Fabio Paratici, the managing director of football they appointed in the summer.
Then there is the issue of timing. Levy tends to push deals as close to the end of the window as possible to secure the highest possible fee. In 2012, for instance, Modric was finally sold to Real Madrid for £30m four days before the window closed. Perhaps the delay did push up the fee by a few million but it also disrupted Tottenham’s start to the season; they took two points from their first three league games and went on to miss out on Champions League qualification by a point.
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The later Kane leaves, the less time Tottenham will have to spend the fee and they will find themselves dealing with clubs who know they have £150m or so ready to spend. In that sense Aston Villa probably handled a similar situation better, signing Emiliano Buendía and Leon Bailey before Grealish had left.
For Tottenham, there is a risk in keeping Kane. He seems unlikely to sulk but what will his value be next summer? What if he gets injured? How easy is it to plan when the highest-profile player at the club wants to leave? And why would Kane have any faith in Levy’s capacity to get this right?
Kane is clearly not blameless but really his desire to go is another consequence of the failure to invest over the final couple of years of Mauricio Pochettino’s time at the club, which itself was a result of the investment in the new stadium. Rising through the hierarchy can be a very painful process.
