The last decade has been England’s most consistently excellent in 150 years of international football. The chief reason is star striker and captain Harry Kane. He has scored 79 career goals, 26 more than any other Englishman in history, and is only getting better at 32. It is hard to imagine us winning the World Cup this summer without him leading the effort. Curiously, though, the footballing giant remains a cultural footnote beyond the pitch.
He has never been known for supermodel looks, natural charisma or a celebrity marriage – he is simply extraordinarily good at his job. Gary Lineker, another one of England’s all-time great strikers, self-deprecatingly calls his podcast company “Goalhanger”. Kane is the opposite of a goalhanger. He marauds up and down the pitch, raking 50-yard passes to teammates and winning the ball back from defenders, often so clearly the best player on the pitch that he seems to start playing every position himself.
But predecessors like David Beckham and Paul Gascoigne loom larger in the national imagination despite lesser footballing ability. Gascoigne’s tears in Italy in 1990 made him immortal overnight through visible vulnerability. Lately, Kane has been most present in the national imagination for an advert in which he enlists Google’s AI assistant Gemini to help him plan a barbecue.
Wayne Rooney, who Kane replaced as England’s record goalscorer, had his share of scandals. With Kane, there has never been anything resembling a scandal. He has been married to Kate, his childhood sweetheart, for seven years and has four children.
David Beckham has a neat character arc, recently told in a hit Netflix show. He was sent off at the 1998 World Cup for needlessly kicking Argentina’s Diego Simeone. Beckham was seen as an effete celebrity not living up to his talents. Redemption came with a free-kick against Greece in 2001 and a World Cup penalty against Argentina the following year. Even though Beckham never led England, these moments are eternal.
It seems an absurd thing to say about England’s all-time top goalscorer, but for all his brilliance, there has not really been a Harry Kane goal that penetrates outside the football world and etches him into the public consciousness in a way his talent deserves. There are candidates, like the stooped header which put England 2-0 up against Germany at Wembley in 2021 on the way to England’s first knockout win over that old enemy since the 1966 World Cup final. But it wasn’t decade-defining in the way of earlier England moments.
His club career has a similar pattern. He spent a decade at Tottenham Hotspur, becoming the club’s all-time scorer for a brilliant team that always fell short in the big moments. There was no trophy-clinching Kane goal because he never won anything at Spurs. In 2023 he left for Bayern Munich, who then had their first trophyless season in 12 years. Kane’s lack of trophies was becoming a meme. Maybe he was cursed.
He has now won two German titles and a German cup, even if the biggest prizes still elude him. While putting up absurd numbers for Bayern domestically, they have fallen short in the Europe-wide Champions League. Kane looked on the verge of tears when his team crashed out to Paris Saint-Germain a few weeks ago.
He remains a curious figure in the era of the footballing individual as a global celebrity brand, like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé. The standout impression of Kane is of a team player working for a collective, often superior to his teammates, but never resentful of it.
There is no better example than England’s World Cup campaign in Qatar in 2022. Kane played a huge role in getting England there, scoring 12 goals in qualifying, and helping England cruise to the quarter-final against France, who scored an early goal. England were awarded a penalty and Kane scored it, as he almost always does, to equal Wayne Rooney’s record of 53 England goals.
France scored again, then England were awarded another penalty, to equalise and send Kane top of the England all-time scoring charts. But, in a very rare lapse, Kane blazed the ball over the bar. England lost 2-1.
The tragedy of 2022 was not Kane’s miss; it is that the miss might be the moment people remember the most from his career, unless a new memory is made in North America this summer.
If Kane scores a crucial knockout goal – even, maybe, in the final – he will go down as not just one of England’s best footballers but its best ever, and a defining figure in the country’s postwar national story.
[Further reading: This might be my last World Cup]
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