The numbers, longevity and sheer force of Kane’s self-made brilliance – rounded off by a Ballon d’Or triumph – make a compelling case that England has never produced a better player, writes , but one more thing is required to cement that status

Before we begin to discuss Harry Kane’s place in English football history, first we need to locate the right word. The genius of Harry Kane? That feels wrong, like something that should be reserved for Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney, players with a dangerous gift. The greatness of Harry Kane? That feels like it belongs to those who have reached the highest pinnacles, like Sir Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore, players who have touched gold with England.

Kane has always been different to other players in English history, and even those in the current football ecosystem. In an elite space dominated by fast-twitch dribblers and physical beasts, Kane has developed into a deft, powerful, meticulous and uniquely brilliant footballer. Perhaps that will do: the brilliance of Harry Kane.

At the core of his brilliance is that Kane created himself through sheer will and a kind of analogue recursive self-improvement. As he said last night ‘the hard work when no-one is watching’.

Of course, recognition of that brilliance has now stretched beyond English shores, not only to Germany – where he breaks Bundesliga goalscoring records for fun – but to the very highest stage. Last night he won the Ballon d’Or in a glitzy ceremony at the London Palladium, becoming just the fifth Englishman to do so after Sir Stanley Matthews, Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen. He saw off more heralded, flashier players – ‘traditional’ superstars such as Kylian Mbappe, Lamine Yamal, Lionel Messi – to claim the award

Cristiano Ronaldo is often held up as the poster boy for hard work, someone who took the seeds of his own talent and grew them into a forest with his bare hands. But the 18-year-old Ronaldo was already so impressive for Sporting Lisbon that Manchester United’s players demanded Sir Alex Ferguson sign him. Whereas the 18-year-old Kane was on loan at Millwall.

Kane started from a lower base. “I didn’t think he would go to this level,” Bournemouth captain Adam Smith, a fellow graduate of Tottenham’s academy, recently told Ben Foster’s Fozcast. “I don’t think anyone thought he would. Physically he wasn’t amazing. He was a big guy but he wasn’t ultra strong. The one thing I noticed, his finishing was always top drawer.

“He always had a top mentality, though… As a 14-year-old, he was always a little bit different. You know a lot of youngsters would just follow each other, but he’d always do his own thing. He had the mental edge on a lot of players.”

It was that drive that took Kane to the very outer limits of his potential, a fire lit by Arsenal’s rejection at eight years old, a relentless mindset inspired by the Tom Brady documentary he watched while on loan at Leicester. His eye for finishing was instinctive but Kane taught himself to shoot with his left foot, to time his leap and head with precision. He very deliberately trained himself to sniff out chances in the chaos of a match situation.

“Someone said to me recently, another player, that my biggest strength is being able to finish from uncomfortable positions,” Kane recently told The Athletic, when asked about his memorable blast into the top corner to beat DR Congo at the World Cup. “So, when I’m off-balance, I’m still able to get my shots off. A lot of players wouldn’t be able to generate the same power from that position.”

Less heralded is how he uses his body as both shield and battering ram, skills honed to a level of mastery. So many of Kane’s greatest goals, just like that one against DR Congo, revolve around his ability to position himself so that a defender cannot touch the ball without conceding a foul. He uses defenders as foils and screens, and trains with mannequins to replicate them in his periphery.

Is Kane the best Englishman to ever play the game? The numbers are compelling: 91 goals in 125 England games, an absurd 152 goals in 154 games for Bayern Munich, a ludicrous 73 for club and country last season, something only bettered once in the history of elite men’s football, by Messi in 2011/12 when he scored 82. And of course, that one Ballon d’Or.

Kane will overtake Peter Shilton’s record when he reaches 126 caps against Croatia next month, and you just know he will be fit to do so, which speaks to the work he has put into his body. He is still only 33 and the examples of Ronaldo, Messi and Robert Lewandowski in recent years show that Kane might feasibly still be scoring goals at 40. He will be a little slower then, but he has always thrived despite a lack of explosive pace.

There are, still, two persistent criticisms of Kane. One is that he doesn’t deliver in the most important games, which just isn’t true: in both the Champions League and major international tournaments, Kane has scored 26 goals in 38 knockout games. Ronaldo has 71 in 102; Messi has 61 in 103. Kane has been in that situation far less often, but his record of 0.68 goals per knockout game stands alongside the best two players of the 21st century. As if to underline the point, Kane scored a hat-trick in last season’s German Cup final.

Of course Kane didn’t perform to his very best in defeats like that by Argentina this summer, or else England would have won. In the same way, Messi did very little in the World Cup final and Argentina lost. It is both fair to say Kane could have done more in knockout defeats; it is also true that England wouldn’t have reached those latter stages without Kane.

The other argument is that he has not won enough trophies, and while he has attended to that anomaly with Bayern, he still hasn’t delivered for England. The counterpoint is that Kane has captained the team through its most successful period since 1966 – two finals, two semi-finals and one quarter-final in eight years. The defeats show the fine margins: four 2-1 losses – including one in extra time and one after Kane himself had missed a penalty – and one shootout.

There will be one or two more opportunities, including a home Euros in the UK and Ireland in 2028. It is not a stretch to imagine that Jude Bellingham, Declan Rice and Elliot Anderson grow into the best midfield trio in international football by then. Thomas Tuchel still needs to settle on his No 1 goalkeeper and build a cohesive defensive unit, but England will go into the tournament among the favourites.

Does Kane need the trophy to cement his legacy as England’s best player? If he finishes his international career with 160 caps and 120 goals, would that be enough? Or would the very fact that Moore and Charlton won the World Cup always leave Kane’s career feeling incomplete, an elite player in the shadow of England’s winning generation?

Perhaps there is only so much one man can do. Like Kane in the Euro 2020 final, Messi scored his penalty in the shootout of the 2022 World Cup final, and then watched as his legacy as the greatest player of all time was left in the hands of [checks notes] Gonzalo Montiel. Montiel scored with a side-foot past Hugo Lloris and history was written.

Kane may yet get there, such is his unending perseverance. The art of goalscoring is his obsession and that, really, is his genius. That is his greatness. And if Kane’s story is never told in quite those terms, without the natural talent or team silverware of other great players, then perhaps it is all the more remarkable that he has climbed to football’s summit.