Jose Mourinho once sat with Harry Kane in the manager’s office at Tottenham’s training ground and explained the difference between the two men.

Kane was a much younger 26-year-old then, the reigning World Cup Golden Boot winner but not considered truly world class outside of England. A prolific striker for club and country, nothing more.

“I have no doubt: you are a winner,” said Mourinho, on his second day in the Spurs job. He felt, though, that “the movie stars of football belong to other places”, that Kane was no superstar. In one of those rare moments when Mourinho brought the topic of conversation back to himself, he insisted that, by contrast, “my dimension is universal”.

“We have to build your status in that direction,” Mourinho said.

In the intervening six years, Kane has done so by himself, through dogged determination, constant refining of his craft, and the relentlessness that staying at the top of the sport for so long necessitates, not needing the help of Mourinho or anyone else.

Harry Kane’s is immortalised by Spurs

Getty

Against Croatia tonight, Kane don England colours for a record 126th time, 98 as captain, as he overtakes Peter Shilton’s tally. He will do so 17 days after beating Kylian Mbappe and Lamine Yamal to win the Ballon d’Or aged 33 years young, crowned the best footballer in the world.

He scored 73 goals for club and country last season, goalscoring of such mechanical, clockwork regularity it saw him surpass Cristiano Ronaldo’s best-ever campaign. Kane’s tally marked the second-greatest season of goalscoring in football’s modern history, trailing only the superhuman tally of 82 goals in 69 games posted by Lionel Messi in 2011-12. He had mentioned wanting to emulate Messi and Ronaldo in that 2019 heart-to-heart with Mourinho.

Yet stats have not always been kind to Kane. No matter the endless individual honours, the reminders of an empty trophy cabinet stalked him for years until his Bundesliga title win with Bayern last year. He is still awaiting a first Champions League title and a major trophy with England after two European Championship finals, two World Cup semi-finals and a quarter-final despite two major tournament Golden Boots.

The latter of those two Golden Boots, which he shared with five other players, arrived at Euro 2024, where he looked out of sorts while nursing a back injury and had to field straight-faced suggestions Gareth Southgate should drop him for Ollie Watkins. He stuck to the task and outscored everyone at the tournament anyway. He has 91 goals for England now, and this summer overtook Pelé for World Cup goals, scoring his 14 at a quicker rate of return than Messi and Ronaldo scored theirs.

And that has been Kane’s enduring quality: he delivers reliable results, England’s royal male. Kane was 33 years and 90 days old when he lifted the Ballon d’Or, fitting for a player who has only improved with age, whose nous and understanding of the game have combined with that unshakable self-belief to take him to heights not even he had envisioned.

He last week signed a new contract at Bayern Munich believed to make him Europe’s highest-paid player by base salary.

Kane is at his peak. As a player, first you are physically good, then you get older and have to get smarter because you can’t physically keep doing what your more efficient brain wants you to. Kane is in the cross-section — still a physical specimen but with that mature footballing IQ to boot. It is an irresistible sight to behold.

Comfortably the best player during his Tottenham years, where he became the club’s record goalscorer, the move to Bayern in 2023 has elevated him and made him better appreciated around the world.

Bayern’s honorary president, Uli Hoeness, declared him the greatest signing the club have ever made on the eve of May’s German Cup final. Kane then scored a hat-trick in a 3-0 win as they won the trophy for the first time in six years.

Harry Kane and Mauricio Pochettino in 2014

GETTY

Bayern have come to appreciate the player Tottenham and England fans always knew they had — the striker whose tall frame and lack of searing pace disguise a Swiss Army Knife reality. For almost a decade, discussion has raged over whether Kane should drop deep as he does or should stay in the box. His sublime raking passes and deftly-weighted through-balls at a moment’s notice were enough to convince Mourinho, Southgate, Vincent Kompany and now Thomas Tuchel that Kane is best when he does as he pleases.

The romance of Kane’s story is that he is one of football’s sight-readers rather than playing his music by ear. His is a learnt talent, honed by repetition. Four EFL loan spells toughened up one of football’s great late bloomers.

That robotic repetition in training has made him a penalty specialist and a sumptuous ball-striker with an instinctive shooting ability, the ball immediately out of his feet and then driven, often low, precisely into the corner as though placed there by hand.

A 21-year-old Kane impressed in pre-season for Tottenham in 2014, yet Pochettino sat him down and informed him his body fat test result of 18 per cent was the highest in the team. Pochettino urged him to work harder: “You can be the best striker in the world.” Kane’s unwavering belief in that statement is, more than anything, what has propelled him there.

Anthony Gordon this summer gave the definitive assessment of what it is like to work with Walthamstow’s finest.

“Anyone at this level can put the ball in the top corner,” Gordon said. “It’s his consistency every single day in training and every game. He’s having a season that has only ever been beaten by the greatest footballer of all time; that speaks to the level he is playing at. You want to pick up as many habits and watch everything he does, to see why he is at that level.

“It is no accident. Every drill, he does it with seriousness. He never ever messes about.”

The complete player, he has spent the last 12 years representing Tottenham, Bayern and England and been the central cog in all three machines, never knowing anything other than being the man to whom others turn.

Some of his rivals for the Ballon d’Or had launched cringey PR campaigns when voting went live. In an answer to The Standard about this, he admitted in the lead up: “It’s just not my personality to talk about myself in that light.”

His body of work spoke for itself in the end. His acceptance speech featured motivation young children heading to Wembley on Thursday evening could do with hearing. “Anything is possible with hard work when no one else is watching.” Everyone is watching him now.

Ahead of another record-breaking night for England’s captain and leader by example, it is worth asking: has Kane proven Mourinho wrong? A movie star? Even now, not really his style. But by staying in his lane and grafting in silence, Kane has joined them — working his way up to the leading role, in his own, very English, way.