Ornstein: Harry Kane open to signing new Tottenham contract

When things aren’t going well with your favorite sportsball team, as fans it becomes far too easy to get caught in a doom spiral. Things don’t go well on the field of play, so we expect that bad things will always follow from that — the results will never improve, the dressing room will fall apart, the manager will leave or get fired...

...Your homegrown generational talent will want to leave.

But sometimes things defy expectations in the most amazing ways. Take Harry Kane, for example. How many of us, looking at the flaming dumpster fire that is Tottenham Hotspur over the past few months, looked at Harry, his expiring contract, and his past agitation to yeet himself to Manchester City and thought There’s no way he signs a new deal at Spurs, we should sell him and rebuild the club from the ground up? I bet it’s a lot. I certainly have!

But that may not be the case after all. David Ornstein, one of the most respected transfer-centric journalists in the business, today writes in The Athletic that Harry Kane is — get this — actually open to signing a new long-term contract at Spurs, which would essentially commit the rest of his career to the club where he started.

Now, there’s a lot of “what-ifs” that remain, and I’m not sure that this reporting does anything to disprove the very real issues that might still be causing Kane to be looking elsewhere. But the one constant throughout Kane’s tenure is that we know he loves Tottenham and wants to win trophies at Tottenham... but that the trophies part is starting to take on a greater level of urgency as Kane heads towards the latter stages of his career. As Ornstein writes, there are still a lot of moving parts, and plenty of scenarios that result in Kane not wanting to sign a new deal and instead look for a greener pasture.

How Tottenham’s campaign ends — they remain in the Champions League and FA Cup — as well as their recruitment and prospects of success are sure to be key factors. While the offer to Kane will carry obvious importance, Spurs’ plans and ambitions have always been central to his thinking.

But boy, this news certainly does serve as a much-needed infusion of good vibes. And it does cause fans to now reconsider their priors — even if Spurs do have to do a “painful rebuild” under a new manager, it no longer feels quite so certain that Harry Kane would not want to be a part of it.