Harry Kane: The Late-Prime Rewrite — What Happens When the “Nearly” Label Follows You

On most weekends in Munich, Harry Kane does what he has always done. He drops into space, brings others into play, and scores goals that look simple only because of how often he repeats them.

For the German champions, it has been productive. But for Kane himself, this is something familiar.

The England captain has scored more than 80 goals for club and country since he left Tottenham in 2023. He smashed it in his first Bundesliga season.

And it did not take long for him to start making plays and getting Bayern's attack going. But the bigger question around him has remained the same. People still see him the same way they did in North London.

The Same Questions

Kane’s rise was never meant to look like this. Released by Arsenal as a teenager, loaned out repeatedly by Tottenham, and overlooked until his early twenties, he forced his way into relevance through goals alone.

He broke through in the 2014-15 season when he bagged 31 goals across competitions. And he has kept going since then.

With Spurs, he won Premier League Golden Boots, carried the team to the 2019 Champions League final, and left the club as their all-time leading scorer.

He captained England to a World Cup semi-final in 2018 and back-to-back Euro finals in 2021 and 2024.

He lost finals, ended seasons without medals, and he did not stop scoring; yet, the trophies were not coming.

You could say life has been unkind to the London-born striker, as the situation became how people saw him. The critics have not been kind, either, as there are those who question whether someone so reliable for years could be seen as one of the game’s greats without a major team honour to point to.

Kane, for his part, rarely pushed back in public. But the few times he did, you could feel his frustration.

“I don’t want to come to the end of my career and have any regrets so I want to be the best I can be,” Kane once said in an interview, as reported by The Guardian.

His move to Bayern Munich was supposed to change the situation. The club had won the Bundesliga almost every season for more than a decade.

He expected to go far in the Champions League every year. The move to Germany looked like a safe bet in football.

On his debut, he scored and went on to break every league record for goals across a calendar year while leading Bayern’s line. Yet Bayern’s season did not follow the script.

Xabi Alonso and his Bayer Leverkusen team came out of nowhere that season, won the title and the German Cup. The Champions League also slipped away, as Real Madrid dumped the Germans out of Europe.

Like in England, Kane ended that season with personal awards and no trophies. It did not help that this was the first time the Munich-based club had ended the season trophiless since 2012. To many, that cemented the theory of a “curse” following the England international.

Inside Bayern, though, they saw things differently. Teammate Leon Goretzka would insist that Kane is “a world‑class footballer and a wonderful guy. You notice his aura immediately in the dressing room. He helps us extremely, he’s a leader.”

For Joshua Kimmich, “We no longer praise him in the dressing room. That’s the standard now.”

Yet, it did not look good for Kane who was 31 years old at the time.

Title Winner

The breakthrough finally came in the 2024–25 season when Bayern Munich delivered what Kane had been looking for. The Bavarians regained the Bundesliga title, sealing it when second‑placed Bayer Leverkusen drew with Freiburg.

The trophy was Kane’s first at age 31, after coming agonisingly close for years. He had carried titles in individual scoring charts without taking a medal home. The Bundesliga crown, however, was unmistakable.

Bayern wrapped up the season with a dominant run and, as a show of his consistency and contribution to the feat, Kane finished as the league’s top scorer again.

The German Super Cup followed later that year, adding another piece of silverware to his cabinet and making it two titles in succession, again, for the first time in his career.

His long wait for team honours had often hidden his impressive goal records. In Munich, he found the trophies to match them. The league title and Super Cup changed the conversation around his late prime. And now, a career that was once defined by “nearly” is now measured by silverware.