Jonathan Tah and Harry Kane nearly faced one another over a decade ago, when Bayer Leverkusen faced Tottenham Hotspur twice in the 2016 Champions League group stages. Unfortunately, Kane was sidelined with an ankle injury, which Tah and Leverkusen duly took advantage of to keep Tottenham off the scoresheet twice and secure a 1-0 win alongside a 0-0 draw.

Their first meeting on a football pitch, then, was in September 2023, when Kane cut short a decade in Tottenham’s colors to sign for Bayern Munich and lined up against what would become the league winners that season. They would face each other multiple times before Tah would pull a Kane, quitting after a decade at Leverkusen to move to Bayern.

Now, Tah and Kane are teammates and see each other on the training field every day. Of course, Tah knew Kane was a special player, but seeing it every day drives the point home.

“I played against him a lot and every time he got better; now I’m playing with him I see why,” Tah explained in a recent interview with The Times (as captured by @iMiaSanMia). “He’s never satisfied, you see him working before and after training. He’s the greatest finisher I’ve seen in my life - and he’s still working on it.”

Who would have thought, back in 2016, that these two would end up two of the most important leaders in the Bayern dressing room in 2026? It is a strange, unpredictable world.