Harry Kane “increasingly likely” to STAY at Tottenham Hotspur despite Bayern agreement

I don’t know how much longer I can take this. According to both Sky Sports and Florian Plettenberg (i.e. both the English and German press), Harry Kane is currently leaning towards rejecting a move to Bayern Munich this summer and staying at Spurs to see out the last year of his contract.

Here’s the clip from Sky Sports:

And here’s the corroborating tweet from Florian Plettenberg, who has been the leading voice from the German media on this transfer. Plettenberg describes it as “50/50” that Kane comes to Bayern.

WHAT IS GOING ONNNNNNNN???

This would be, without hyperbole, a pretty shocking turnaround from Kane if he decides not to move. For months now all we’ve heard about is that Bayern were utterly convinced that he’d join if an agreement was worked out between the clubs. There were even reports from last month that said Kane had already agreed personal terms with Bayern ahead of the clubs coming to an arrangement. Daniel Levy has spent the past number of weeks in intense negotiations with his Bayern counterparts to hammer out an agreement that was just finalized, at least in principle, this morning.

There are, at this point, no discussions about whether Kane would sign a contract extension at Spurs should he turn down the move.

My god are there layers to this. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

So on the one hand I completely recognize that this is an extremely difficult decision for Harry Kane. He’s debating whether he wants to leave the club that trained him as a schoolboy and brought him through, nurturing him into the best striker in England and one of the greatest Tottenham players of all time. That’s hard! This could very well be the emotional process he needs to go through to come to terms with the hardest decision of his professional career.

On another level, this is the smart play from Kane — the best option from him, setting aside club loyalty, the fans, and anything else apart from his own self-interest, is to see out his contract, leave on a free transfer, and get the best deal for himself and his family. The problem with that is that it’s completely and utterly cynical. Yes, Spurs fans would get another year with their icon, but at the expense of needed funds for the club to adequately replace him, even if they qualify for the Champions League next season, and he’d get to potentially sign a pre-contract with a club rival in January.

The club has put significant time and effort into negotiating his exit from the club because that’s what the club thought he wanted. To come to an agreement for his exit only for him to turn that down and leave on a free would be not only the worst possible outcome for the club, but would represent a pretty seismic betrayal of trust. Maybe the club deserves that for the “gentleman’s agreement” a couple of seasons ago, but it’s still pretty cynical as hell.

The thing is, a large section of the fanbase probably wouldn’t care, at least initially. All many fans want — justifiably! — is another year with their club icon. If he stays, there will be an outpouring of support for Harry and a large amount of cheering from the fanbase. But at what cost?

The final level of this — turning down Bayern to stay at Spurs would be without question the most hilarious outcome. Set aside what it would do to the club and the fanbase, can you IMAGINE the reaction from Bayern and its fanbase? From a pure troll-tastic narrative perspective: outstanding. Truly delicious. I would laugh for a full week before then going back to being furious at Harry.

To be clear, we do not yet know what Harry will do. He very well could decide the best thing is to leave so the club gets the money. We’ll find out shortly, possibly even today. But that’s the state of play at the moment.

What a mess.