From doughy-faced teen in Rochdale rain to Ballon d’Or winner

Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty

‘Plenty of people claim they were there for 

his debut but there were very few of us’ 

   - Leyton Orient fanzine editor

1 Nov 2026 -  Sport

Andrew Butler

About 200 Leyton Orient fans were there to witness Harry Kane’s senior debut 15 years ago – it was the beginning of a remarkable career that has featured no scandal, continuous improvement and now, at last, formal recognition as the best player on the planet

It was a game that should have been forgotten, according to Keith Hill. The then-Rochdale manager, furious that his side's match against Leyton Orient went ahead due to bad weather, said the 1-1 draw “wasn't a spectacle, it was a farce”. He went on: “I don't think the game should have been played. That's forgotten now, it's history.”

Unfortunately for Hill, that game in January 2011 will never be forgotten. In the 73rd minute, a 17-year-old, doughy-faced Harry Kane entered a senior football match for the first time.

“It was absolutely pouring with rain,” said Aynsley Taylor, editor of the Leyton Orientear fanzine, who was at Spotland that afternoon. “There were probably fewer than 200 Orient fans there – a bit like the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall: plenty of people claim they were there, but in reality, there were very few of us.

“His arrival was completely unremarkable. Orient folklore now suggests everyone was underwhelmed by him at the time, that his fellow Spurs loanees Tom Carroll looked far better and PaulJosé M'Poku was flashier. To an extent that's true, but I distinctly remember thinking that he was clearly a natural finisher.

“That was always his standout quality. He didn't look fast, flashy or overtly athletic, but in front of goal he was razor-sharp.”

I was one of those voices from the terraces at that time. In 2013, two years after his stint at Orient, I wrote on social media that Kane “was a quality player, but not sure he's a Championship promotion player… yet”. The “yet” has, I hope, somewhat spared my blushes 13 years later.

That Kane has gone from that game in Rochdale to having prime minister Andy Burnham congratulate him on his Ballon d'Or in parliament minutes before his first budget is remarkable. But what is most remarkable is the manner in which he has gone about his business. Instagram statements made by footballers are often trite, inconsequential PR guff, but Kane called it right when he posted: “Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise” after picking up the Ballon d'Or on Monday night.

Managers have consistently said that his dedication is what sets him apart. Former Orient boss Russell Slade would talk about him staying out for extra sessions after the rest of the squad were showering. Joe Gallen, Kane's assistant manager at Millwall, noticed how “low maintenance” the striker was, that he carried “no baggage with him”. Former Tottenham head coach Mauricio Pochettino simply said he was “in love” with him.

One of the most pleasing aspects of Kane's slow, steady rise to superstardom is how he has added to, and adapted, his game. In the six campaigns from 2014-15 to 2019-20, Kane averaged 4.7 assists per season at club level.

In the following six campaigns, that number more than doubled to 11. The accusation that he was “dropping too deep” for a striker belies the fact that both his assist and goalscoring rate have increased in that time. Quite simply, he has become a better player.

It is also remarkable just how scandal-less Kane's 15 years in football have been. That the Football Association has had to issue more apologies to its future captain (in 2018, the FA apologised for a tweet poking fun at Kane's performance against Manchester United in an FA Cup semi-final) than vice-versa is not normal.

Honestly, what other skeletons are there? That he missed Spurs training in 2021 during the Manchester City transfer saga? That the statue of him couldn't be placed at Chingford train station because it failed a Transport for London risk assessment? That his corners were terrible at Euro 2016 despite the fact he was born in a

hospital called Whipps Cross? Is that all you've got?

He became the first England captain since Billy Wright in the 1950s to lead England to three World Cups. He will likely become only the fourth men's player in history to score 100 goals for his country, and is set to become England's most-capped male player next month. He won the World Cup Golden Boot in 2018 and finished as the joint-top scorer at Euro 2024. The only world left to conquer for Kane is a trophy with England.

He has the respect of those whose opinion matters. Gary Lineker called him “the greatest English striker we've ever had”. Jude Bellingham went one further, saying he's the best English player outright. But one tribute, albeit from a less wellknown figure, struck the perfect note. Millwall's Jimmy Abdou, who shared the pitch with Kane 21 times in 2011-12, wrote: “I feel immense pride of having shared those moments, of knowing that our paths have crossed, and of being able to say to my sons: ‘I played with him.'”

***

Kane’s place in English football pantheon now impossible to ignore

‘It does sometimes feel as though 

he is taken for granted, just a little’

1 Nov 2026 - The Observer / Sport

Rory Smith Football Correspondent

The debate over who, exactly, should be regarded as the greatest player of all time is not the sort of thing with which serious people should concern themselves. It is the sort of subject even a pub bore might feel is a bit obvious, a conversation settled in Year 4 and relegated to quiet news week local radio phone-in fodder.Stefan Matzke/GettyLike a fine wine: Kane’s scoring feats have grown ever more impressive since moving to Bayern Munich in his thirties.

That principle applies even when the question is geographically targeted. How is anyone meant to establish, for example, the identity of England's greatest ever player? By what metric can you establish if Bobby Moore was meaningfully, objectively better than Gordon Banks, or Gary Lineker, or Stanley Matthews?

And how do we do that across eras? How do we compare Duncan Edwards, an avatar of eternal promise and lost youth, with David Beckham, a man whose life has been lived under such forensic scrutiny that I know the type of car in which his wife used to travel to school? How can we gauge the superiority of Bobby Charlton over Wayne Rooney, or vice-versa, when one lived in the age of the combover, and the other in the age of the hair transplant?

All of which is a long preamble to say that there is a very good chance that the answer to this question may now be Harry Kane: not just England's leading goalscorer and record appearance-maker, but as of Monday night, the first English player in a quarter of a century to win the Ballon d'Or. He saw off Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal to claim the game's most prestigious individual award; he is now one of just five English players and seven Brits to have won it*.

That alone, of course, is not a clinching argument – there is no clinching argument, because this debate has no solution – not least because there is rather less overlap between the list of English Ballon d'Or winners and England's greatest ever players than you might expect. But still: Kane's victory is at least a chance to reflect a little on how, in what is turning into the glorious autumn of his career, he is seen in this country.

In one sense, of course, suggesting he may be the finest player England has produced is not exactly an edgy take. Jude Bellingham made the same pronouncement this month, when Kane equalled Peter Shilton's record for England appearances. Steven Gerrard repeated it last week. Rooney said it in 2024 and again last year. Nobody underappreciates Kane. His predecessors and his peers regard him with a blend of affection and awe.

Just occasionally, though, it does feel as though he is taken for granted, just a little. It can feel as if the true scale of his achievements is not quite grasped, or that it is dismissed just a touch too quickly, or maybe even that he has been so reliable for so long that we have grown used to what might once have appeared extraordinary.

There are several factors behind this. One is probably no more complex than football's instinctive tendency to degrade the present in favour of some distant, idealised past. It is a charming curiosity of a game and an industry that is so hyper-focused on the now – where every shot matters more and where every Sunday is Super – that most fans revere what came before almost unquestioningly; the heroes of today can never really compete, in memory, with players who have become legend.

Another is that the past couple of years of Kane's career have taken place elsewhere. His time at Bayern Munich has been a remarkable success. He has scored 73 goals in 65 games in the 2025-26 season; as of a couple of weeks ago, he has scored more goals in the Champions League after turning 30 than Lionel Messi.

English fans, though, will not have seen the vast majority of those goals; those they have caught, in snatched highlights and brief social media clips, might have been dismissed – by some, at least – as empty calories, sugar-rush goals in a league where they come easy, in much the same way as the Bundesliga titles he has won are scorned, just a little, as trophies won by default while playing for Germany's big red machine.

Instead, Kane now tends to be judged as we judged foreign players for so long: on how he performs (maybe) in the latter stages of the Champions League and (particularly) what he does in the World Cup. This sets an almost impossibly high bar: the Kane of this year that made the deepest impression on the English psyche was the one who was unable to claw his team past Argentina to make the World Cup final, who could not avert yet another couple of years of hurt. To many, that will undermine his claim to be the greatest player this country has produced; until it is rectified, he can never be the equal of Charlton or Moore.

And that is fine, of course: this debate would not be what some people regard as fun if we were not all talking at cross-purposes, working on completely unrelated criteria, all of which change to suit our arguments. But we should probably try, at least, not to feel quite so queasy about extending Kane's candidacy, not to worry that it is recency bias or childlike overenthusiasm to suggest his name, to appreciate the golden coda to his career he is enjoying in Germany, to marvel at what he has done while he is still doing it.

* Trivia fans: Sir Stanley Matthews, Denis Law, Sir Bobby Charlton, George Best, Kevin Keegan, Michael Owen, Harry Kane.

***

A relentless goalscorer, peerless in this country

1 Nov 2026 - The Observer / Sport

Bill Edgar

Harry Kane held a similar status to Dele Alli and Raheem Sterling among England players at the 2018 World Cup, but while those teammates faded in their 20s, Kane has gone on and on, if anything improving into his 30s. Of the 48 different players to have won the Ballon d'Or, only four have been older than Kane, 33, when receiving the award (for the 10 multiple winners, the age at which they collected their latest award is counted).

Until Kane arrived on the scene, the gap between first and second in the England top scorers list had never been more than six goals since 1909: that was when Jimmy Greaves led Sir Bobby Charlton 43-37 heading into the 1966 World Cup. However, Kane, who equalled Wayne Rooney's tally of 53 in 2022, is now 38 clear of the field on 91.

Kane has been head and shoulders above all other English goalscorers during his career. Since the summer of 2014, when he was about to establish himself at Tottenham Hotspur, he has scored 300 more goals than any other Englishman across the big-five European leagues, the Champions League and England matches: his total is 461, with Jamie Vardy next on 161.

In six of his last nine seasons at Tottenham he was among the Premier League's top two scorers and he continued his prolific run on joining Bayern Munich in 2023. He hit eight goals more than any other player in his first season in the Bundesliga, beat the rest by five in his second campaign, and finished 17 clear of the field in his third. He reached 100 German top-flight goals in only his 98th appearance, which beat Dieter Müller's record by 31 games.

Throw in his 51 league assists over the past six years for Tottenham and Bayern, and his position as one of the greatest English players is clear.