Harry Kane will never be worth £50m again

Harry Kane’s 2015/16 season will probably not be as good as his astonishing 2014/15 one. He’ll probably score fewer goals, he’ll probably have more games where he’s anonymous and he might even be completely awful. If Manchester United really are prepared to offer £50m for Harry Kane (and let’s take that rumour with a tablespoon of salt) there’s a strong chance Spurs will never be able to draw such a high fee for him again in the future.

There’s certainly an argument to be made, then, for taking United’s money and dumping the Chigwell Eusebio just six months after his match winning brace against Woolwich. You could split that £50m between a Kane replacement up top and a new defensive midfielder and improve the team overall.

The problem with this is very familiar to anyone who remembers the striking similarity of the arguments made in favour of selling Gareth Bale two summers ago. People argued that £86m seemed like an incredible amount of money for Gareth and they were right. They argued that he would probably deteriorate and wouldn’t command such a fee again in the future and they were right. They argued that with the £86m we could build a team that was better overall and they were completely wrong.

[linequote]Sometimes you’ll spend £17m to improve your midfield and get Luka Modric, and other times you’ll spend £17m to improve your midfield and get Paulinho[/linequote]

That’s not to say that just because we blew a big sum of money once we always will, but signing players at our level is a hit and miss process. The players who we can be confident would considerably improve us want money and a level of football we can’t offer. This means that our best chance of finding players good enough is to invest in players with potential and, through no fault of our own, the results of this will vary. Sometimes you’ll spend £17m to improve your midfield and get Luka Modric, and other times you’ll spend £17m to improve your midfield and get Paulinho. Any spending spree is likely to come with its share of failed transfers. For every summer we’ve bought an Eriksen we’ve bought a Capoue, for every Lloris a Dembele, for every Bale a Darren Bent.

Players of Kane’s calibre don’t come around very often. A player who scores 30 goals in a season is usually the best possible outcome of a speculative signing for the future. Reinvesting his transfer fee could well lead to us not picking up a single player as good as he is now, and we know better than anyone that free license to improve your squad from the transfer market is far from a guarantee of success.

In addition, the pro ‘selling Gareth Bale’ argument held some weight just because Bale so clearly wanted to leave. This was nothing new to Spurs fans who had recently have watched Michael Carrick, Robbie Keane, Dimitar Berbatov and Luka Modric manufacture, sometimes very publicly, moves to pastures new. If we’d refused to sell him, Bale’s desire to leave could’ve been highly disruptive to other players and would’ve eventually led to him winding down his contract to leave for nothing.

With Kane there seems to be no evidence of a desire to leave. In fact, he signed a 5 year contract before the season started only to sign a new 5 and a half year extension midway through the season. He has publicly repeated his desire to stay at Tottenham and all noises from his camp are positive. Selling him would be pushing him out of the door; forcing out a 31 goal, 21 year old homegrown striker.

Then there’s this certainty that Harry Kane will struggle in the future. In many ways Kane has been a victim of his own success. A reactionary footballing public desperate to provide an opinion away from the norm have criticised him towards the end of the season for being inferior to Sergio Aguero or Diego Costa. Harry Kane.

[fullquote]Kane has publicly repeated his desire to stay at Tottenham and all noises from his camp are positive. Selling him would be pushing him out of the door[/fullquote]

As Kane has burst through barriers no-one thought he would come near, a new barrier has then been raised, and raised and raised. A striker who no-one expected to reach double figures in the league has risen to each ever-more-difficult challenge set to him and has excelled so astonishingly that now the only way to be able to criticise him is to write him off as a one season wonder in spite of the strikingly obvious observation that Kane hasn’t yet had his second season.

“Be wary, Spurs fans,” you might hear, “remember Michael Ricketts? Andy Carroll? James Beattie?” and I could sit here and point out the many ways in which Kane’s case varies from each ‘flop’ he’s compared to but that would just be answering a confused and angry mob desperate to sully the achievements of a player they wish their club had.

Players have shot onto the scene and failed to live out the careers the media’s hype machine promised, but players have also shot onto the scene and gone on to be greats. Kane, still shy of his 22nd birthday, possesses so many attributes that should stand him in good stead as his career develops. His touch, his anticipation, his strength, his surprising speed, his aerial prowess and his fine finishing are all those displayed by the kind of striker who would set your pulse racing if he played for another club and Spurs were linked to him.

Instead of placing Kane in the company of strikers whose star shone brighter rather than longer, let’s examine a list, courtesy of Twitter user @BenLewis0795, of players who scored 20 Premier League goals in a season before their 24th birthday; Alan Shearer, Andy Cole, Robbie Fowler, Cristiano Ronaldo, Sergio Aguero, Gareth Bale, Harry Kane. Some company. Shorten to the criteria to 21 and under and just Fowler and Kane remain.

But really, what the decision of whether or not to sell Kane comes down to is completely irrespective of his ability. It does not matter if the eleven men in lilywhite would be better if we took United’s obscene money, selling Kane would be perhaps the worst decision Daniel Levy ever made.

[linequote]Kane’s touch, his anticipation, his strength, his surprising speed, his aerial prowess and his fine finishing are all those displayed by the kind of striker who would set your pulse racing if he played for another club and Spurs were linked to him[/linequote]

Selling Kane now might well maximise our profit but we as fans of Tottenham Hotspur should not care about that. Obviously we need the club to be financially stable, but once that’s been assured, Spurs making big profits should only appeal to the fans if these profits will be reinvested either into building a squad I enjoy watching more, or into cheaper tickets. I can hear you laughing at the suggestion of the latter.

And in the case of selling Harry Kane, more profit simply does not mean enjoying watching Spurs more, no matter how well it’s spent. Even if that £50m could make the team better, Harry Kane holds a value to Spurs fans that is greater than his value to any other club.

There’s a reason you cheer his goals louder than anyone else’s, and that victories via his goals feel sweeter than any other. It’s because of that moment after he’s turned in a goal at the back post and loses himself in sheer delirium. His face explodes into genuine, unadulterated joy, his gangly limbs flail hopelessly and he sprints to throw himself towards the fans because he doesn’t know what else to do with his body. It isn’t cool, it certainly isn’t calculated, it’s passion, joy, ecstasy and it’s something that couldn’t be swapped for all the £25m strikers under the sun.

When Harry Kane stumbles to a paltry 15 league goals next year some will bemoan us not cashing in now, but I’ll be too busy watching ‘Harry Kane – all 31 goals 2014-15 | HD’ to care.