The best part about building a £1.2bn stadium is the endless sense of possibility. Tottenham Hotspur has been reinvented. Progressive house is blasted over the speakers. The branding is slick, the nods to history subtle.
Everything about a matchday at Thomas Frank’s Tottenham tells you this is a club being jolted into the future. And then you turn a corner. Onto Whitehall Street, where tourists lap up selfies with the 25-foot mural. He’s One of Our Own.
He is not, of course, contractually, in that he plays for Bayern Munich and in fact scored the opening goal in a 4-0 victory, when the Harry Kane of the here and now met his old haunts in a pre-season friendly.
In another sense, he will always be synonymous with Spurs, both as record goalscorer and their greatest player of the 21st century. Inexplicably, that never translated into actually winning anything, perhaps another reason he embodied an infuriating, perplexing period of their history.
The prospect that Kane should one day return would be the easiest PR win in the world. German publication Bild were the first to report this week that a £54m release clause in his contract can be activated from January.
On top of that, Spurs are thought to have included a buy-back option when they agreed an £86m deal with Bayern in 2023. Frank says he would be “more than welcome”, while also conceding that Kane coming back is nothing more than a pipedream, as it stands.
Frank’s reality is in fact more urgent. In Dominic Solanke and Richarlison, he has two established strikers who have missed 65 games and 295 days of football between them since the start of last season.
Randal Kolo Muani had very limited experience of injuries before he arrived on loan; now he too has been ruled out. Mathys Tel has scored three times in seven months and had another difficult night against League One Doncaster in the Carabao Cup. There was no room for him in the Champions League squad.
The solution to that has to be long-lasting. Kane will be 33 next July. Next summer may be his last World Cup and if it is any consolation, England have not carved out a clear succession plan either.
But perhaps that is a needlessly bleak painting of the current situation. Spurs are joint-second in the Premier League, went toe-to-toe with Paris Saint-Germain in the Super Cup, and have only lost once, to Bournemouth, since the season began.
Under Frank – who said after Bournemouth that having too many strikers on the books would be a “problem” – they have won in two cups, beaten Manchester City away, won two games by a three-goal margin and fought back from 2-0 down to claim a point at Brighton.
A work in progress, but if there is one word that sums up the reason for Frank’s appointment – over, say, Mauricio Pochettino – it is vision. Daniel Levy might be gone, but the idea remains: was adamant that looking back could never be the way forward.
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Signing an imitation of Kane is a non-starter. When Graham Potter was at Brighton, people used to tell him that all his side were missing was a 20-goal-a-season striker. “How many people scored 20 goals last season?” he chuckled back. “It’s just two – Salah and Kane. I’ll ring up Tony Bloom and ask him to sign Kane, then.”
You cannot begrudge the absurd nostalgia of indulging in the fantasy. Earlier this year thousands turned up at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to see a middle-aged Robbie Keane score a hat-trick in a legends match. This is a fanbase raised on a diet of black-and-white footage. You do not have to look back very far, however, to see how it can go wrong.
Gareth Bale walked out to the hush of empty stands during Covid. Jose Mourinho did not get the best out of him, nor appear to want him there at all. There was little sentimental about it, instead a feel of squeezing into a coat that no longer fits. Which is the crux of why Kane left in the first place. Nobody doubts the potential of Frank’s side, nor of Spurs as an institution – it is the wait to see what fruit it bears, and for that, Kane had essentially given up.
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