Sell Harry Kane
Image courtesy of (ahem) Tottenham Hotspur.
Outside of the birds of St. Louis’s baseball operation, all of my favourite teams appear to be in varying states of jeopardy. My Boston Celtics head into a playoff series with the Brooklyn Nets as a ragtag mix of erratic shooters and inconsistent defenders. The New England Patriots have made strong off-season moves, and finally for once in Bill Belichick’s life drafted a quarterback! — but the AFC East, long one of American football’s most clear-cut divisions, has never looked more precarious to me. Doff your hats to Tottenham Hotspur, for whom nearly everything has gone horribly wrong in 2021.
A negative manager has undone all of Mauricio Pochettino’s hard work, which was to tie the club’s vision of itself as an attacking exemplar to some much-needed physicality. That negative manager is gone, but filling the vacancy left by Mourinho is wildly complicated. Spurs are set to miss out on Champions League football, are almost destined to lose the best striker in Europe, and like literally any other business in the world are trying to recover from the effects of a global pandemic. But personally, as someone that doesn’t mind watching an athletic identity come into itself, I refuse to pander to gloom and doom — instruments media houses need to generate clicks.
Let’s start somewhere. Try as I might, I can’t fault Daniel Levy for his stewardship of my football club. The chairman, who functions in an executive capacity, does so like a gentleman that just might happen to be a Tottenham supporter. He appears to dislike unattractive football; ask the dozen or more coaches that have seen the sword in the 20-year ownership tenure of ENIC Group. He believes in an Academy’s ability to form the spine of a competitive football side. He’s finagled Spurs the most majestic stadium possibly in all of sports, certainly in all of football, and a dazzling training facility to boot. He brought Gareth Bale home.
Even for the misguided super-gaffe that was the European Super-League, which I assure you I despised to my core, (I popped and withdrew and popped again a Leeds away jersey, in a shopping cart), Levy can reasonably be accused of only ever wanting what’s the absolute best for Spurs. There’s a reason he’s regarded as the most difficult negotiator in club football, and will most likely make Harry Kane’s life a living hell in the coming weeks.
Kane doesn’t deserve any such treatment. Most fans will agree he’s earned himself a big money transfer to whichever club he’d like to play for, as long as that club isn’t based in London. The confluence of events is such that the timing of Kane’s alleged request for a fresh challenge couldn’t be more perfect even for Tottenham Hotspur. It is time, as they say, to cash out: Kane is turning 28, spends 2 to 3 months of every season maligned by injury, and the club needs to fund the overhaul of a squad that’s run its mileage.
Tottenham Hotspur have been to FA Cup semi-finals, a Champions League final, a Carling Cup one, and have realistically competed for the Premier League more than once in the last few years. Each time they have come up short, and there’s nothing explicitly wrong with over-performance. Football is a financial game, and Spurs (unlike most so-called ‘winners’) have competed and entertained within their means. If they were a basketball team, they would be the New York Knicks. I’m sorry, no, I couldn’t resist, lols; if they were a basketball team, it would be well past time to shake up the chemistry.
You go ahead and sell Harry Kane because you owe this to a player who has spent his prime years giving you everything he’s got. A new manager, and I sincerely hope it will be Ralf Rangnick, or that Rangnick will be tasked with appointing one, then needs to be purchased a shiny footballer or two to play with when he arrives. When Kane was injured, in a previous season and for a long spell under Pochettino, Heung-Min Son showed the fan-base what else our attack can look like: quicker down the middle, perhaps with shots on goal distributed more evenly across the starting lineup. Kane has since added an indispensable passing game and even some defense to his game. But it’s helpful to imagine that Kane has also peaked; that it’s time to reshape the attack, rebuild it into what will spear-head the club’s tactical shape for the next five years.
Only stupid teams are cast forever to the gallows by the loss of single players, no matter how brilliant, and only silly observers damn them to that fate prematurely. If you can implement and disseminate philosophy, make it a way of life, you can negotiate the ebbs and flows that are a natural feature of competitive sports. You can be Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Ajax — even if, yes, sure, lads, go on, have at it, you happen to be Tottenham Hotspur. Just ask a Leeds United fan how exhilarating it feels to go hell-for-leather every damn week.
Rangnick is credited with shaping the Red Bull football brand, and of being the godfather of gergenpressing; the relentless style of play now commonly associated with Jurgen Klopp, Julian Nagelsmann, and even Thomas Tuchel. Rangnick for me would represent an infrastructural appointment, and refurbish Levy’s ability to shut the door on outside noise when he needs to make massive calls. It’s time to live within our means. Shop lower down the table, and the divisions, and up and down the Pyrenees, for young talent. Mock and execute cunning swaps for all of our senior statesmen, actually, and for luxury vehicles like Dele Alli, Giovanni Lo Celso and Tanguy Ndombele. It’s time, I say, to live within our means, and get that locker room besotted with the beautiful game again.
One of my high school buddies, when we reunited in college, gave me a hell of a lesson at the cafeteria once about depreciating assets — during the Kaka saga at AC Milan. If you’ve achieved all the success you can with a player, or not, and if the player appears to be at the peak of his powers, or roughly 27, as painful as it may seem you must sell. The fucker had a point.
