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3 hours ago
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Everyone has their favourite mental comfort food, the stuff that makes you feel good in troubled times. Maybe you like baking bread and listening to history podcasts about Nazi atrocities. Maybe it’s watching Notting Hill in a Hugh Grant mask.
Perhaps you love to unwind by sitting in your walnut-panelled library and reading Catullus, naked, covered in Doritos crumbs, with a plastic bag over your head. Or enjoy nothing better than doomscrolling in a state of late-night brain-death, before accidentally subscribing to a mystery supplement that will rid you of all the horrific writhing parasites inside your body, because the advert had a really convincing animated graphic that made you hate yourself.
Obviously, I wouldn’t do any of these things. We’re talking about you here. But there are some deeply comforting sport things out there for these moments. Mid-90s Champions League highlights. Cricket clips featuring Shane Warne in iconic white bell-bottoms. And an understated treat: interviews when Harry Kane talks about real-life events as though they are in fact a football match.
Kane is famously good at this, and in a way that is always hugely endearing. There was the one where he described the miracle of childbirth and made it sound like a tricky away game at San Siro, wanting to be involved and do everything he can, the fact he was particularly proud of his wife for delivering on the biggest stage (also: actual useful new dad stuff).
Last year, he did a TV interview where he made having a family Christmas sound like preparing for a major European title decider – “ultimately I’m there to put smiles on faces and bring the fun, so yeah I’m looking forward to it”.
And the moment I knew I didn’t just like Kane but loved him, when he read a book on CBeebies and described the act of delivering a bedtime story as though it was a delayed tournament squad announcement, not least for his own kids who “will be extremely excited to hear this”.
To be fair, he looked a bit spooked during the actual read, talking very, very slowly, like a man being held hostage by eight-year-old sadists and playing for time while the Swat team prepares to dynamite the bunker doors. But Kane is always so reassuringly genuine in these moments, another example of how, without peacocking around promoting his brand, he is the most likable, authentic, role model-ish modern-day England player.
The reason for talking about this is that we are at a moment of Peak Kane. Right now, April 2026, he is as close as he’s ever going to get to winning the Ballon d’Or, and to being the best footballer in the world. There are reflexive Kane haters out there who will be disturbed by this suggestion. But it’s not complicated. The bookies agree Kane is in a three-way race with Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal. He will end the season as European Golden Boot winner. From here he needs a Champions League medal or a very good World Cup to win the Ballon d’Or vote in late July.
It is worth pointing this out, if only because both of these things look less likely as of this week. Kane is injured. He may still play in Bayern Munich’s quarter-final first leg against Real Madrid on Tuesday. If he does it may be in a familiar post-injury lull. Kane has never been in teams where he can be rested. He often plays the big games in spring unfit and tired, and is duly accused of being a bottler or a drag.
Does it really matter? Getting here is a major thing. The current Bayern team, Vincent Kompany’s blazer and baseball cap buccaneers, has been more of a mini-era than many people expected, mainly based around Kane’s influence. All sorts of team-scoring records are within reach. Kane needs 10 in the last eight games to match the record Bundesliga season tally. For a man who never talks big or acts big he has a happy knack of becoming the key player wherever he goes.
Even his absence from last week’s doom-laden England double-header has been great for Kane. For the first time since 2018 he will now enter a tournament unquestioned and appropriately cherished.
There is a third element too. In the most unlikely plot twist of all, Kane has become cool. He has always been likable and agreeably old-fashioned. The ghost of a kindly East End chimney sweep is suddenly playing for Spurs. England are being led out in a tournament final by a Victorian bank clerk with a hamster in his waistcoat watch pocket. In the Bayern years, Kane has become leaner, more glossed, more Euro-handsome. The jaw. The gaze. The iconic hairline. He looks like he drinks liquid oxygen and lives in a cryogenic ski lodge. More to the point, he’s even cool on the internet.
Previously, the sole point of Kane clips was to highlight his disgustingly lumpen English touches. These days there are sensual montages of his finishing craft and passing range. The Champions League goal against Atalanta has been widely fawned over, a bundling turn and toe-poke that is either the greatest act of micro-dribbling since Romário, or the football equivalent of King Kong stamping on the New York courthouse and punting a fire truck into the Hudson.
Mainly, it’s the uplifting way Kane is good, his ability to improve, to max out his talent. At the end of his CBeebies episode, Kane says: “I’ll be back soon for another bedtime story, until then dream big little lions” and through the haze of tears and snot it soon becomes clear this was a lie and he hasn’t been back at all. But the story of a shy mouse who goes abroad to find his inner lion does seem prophetic.
He was 30 at the time and in his last season at Spurs. Even this pro-Kane page would soon be suggesting it might be time to give England the swerve to protect his body and change the energy. Instead, his career has basically gone through the roof post-CBeebies. All-time England top scorer. 136 goals in 133 games for Bayern. Above all Kane has shown his brilliance as an all-round footballer, and in the process highlighted a common confusion about what talent really is.
Much of the chat last week was about Phil Foden’s struggles as a false 9, with attendant hand-wringing about how England fails to get the most out of its jewels, its fancy boys, its lost prodigies. But zoom out and Foden is quite a limited footballer next to Kane, who may not have his Pep-glow and his hyper-modern sheen, but is clearly a better false 9, a better No 10, a better scorer, probably a better winger, and definitely a more intelligent all-round footballer.
English football does know how to get the best out of its grand talents. You just have to accept that the bloke who learned in the Football League, who doesn’t seem flash or twinkly, is also your most gifted player.
No doubt Kane will still be written off by some as a goalhanger and bottle job. He did stink the place out at Euro 2024. But he’s the opposite of a drain on the collective. Another underrated Kane virtue: he makes other players better. Son Heung-min, Michael Olise, Raheem Sterling. He’s a partnership builder, a connection guy.
Mainly, he’s a hopeful figure in a world where things increasingly don’t work or fall flat. Bayern signed Kane for a doomed-looking record fee that he has fully justified. He’s in great shape. He loves Germany, loves schnitzel, loves holding up huge glasses of wheat beer that he will almost immediately hand to the nearest member of club staff.
It’s a story of English curiosity overseas, of a kind of one-man post-Brexit reconnection, and of a moment that may now pass. Kane has racked up 748 professional games to get here.
This might be it, his snapshot in time, as close as he ever gets to the sun. One thing is certain. He will leave a huge, quietly lovable content hole when he does finally go.
