A long but interesting accounts of events starting in May.
How Daniel Levy trumped the bungling Harry Kane camp
The Spurs striker relied on his brother’s advice but neither could outwit a stubborn opponent, writes Tom Roddy
On the morning of May 18, the unusual silence set an appropriate tone. The players of Tottenham Hotspur arrived at the club’s Enfield training ground, driving down the winding entrance road towards the car park for the main building, while anticipating the fallout from the night before.
News that Harry Kane had informed Tottenham he wanted to leave this summer had filtered out and been reported across every media outlet in the country, from television bulletins to back pages. The England captain had grown frustrated at Spurs, envious at seeing international team-mates competing for major trophies while his boyhood club, now managerless after sacking José Mourinho, had missed out on Champions League qualification for a second successive year. Kane had hit the eject button: He wanted to land at Manchester City.
Around 9.30am, his Tottenham team-mates parked up with some heading to the gym and others to the canteen where they discovered the giant television, which is made up of four screens and would usually show rolling coverage of Sky Sports News, had been turned off. Every television in the building was blank. Tottenham had decided to shut out the noise and ignore it.
This represented the approach Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman, decided to take for the next 100 days. The fiercest negotiator in football would not be moved from his position, with experience informing his decision not to get involved in the deafening noise and media briefings every time an attempt was made to unsettle those inside the country club-like quarters of the training ground.
All the moves were made by Kane. As City sat back, baulking at the £160 million figure placed on a prize asset with a long-term contract, Kane and his advisers were the ones trying to tempt Levy to the negotiating table. The man with the poker face would not play their game and watched on as their clumsy moves began to tear apart Kane’s long-held reputation among Spurs supporters as a loyal and grounded professional.
For weeks now, it has been clear that Levy held all the cards. As The Sunday Times reported on August 15, the day of Manchester City’s awkward trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Levy was digging in on his determined stance not to allow Kane to leave the club and would not even accept the previous asking price.
Although there were desperate last attempts from the Kane camp to salvage the move, the striker had finally succumbed to reality by Tuesday afternoon. On the lush fairways of Queenwood Golf Club, in Surrey, an angry and upset Kane revealed to team-mates that the messy summer saga was, for now, dead. Confirmation came yesterday afternoon on Twitter, when publicly stated he would remain at the club: “I will be staying at Tottenham this summer and will be 100% focused on helping the team achieve success.”
It brought an end to the messy three months which has left an inescapable blot on Kane’s clean reputation. Respected pundits, like Gary Neville, who described the England captain as a model professional gave him no excuse and accused Kane of disrespecting Tottenham team-mates. The repair job will now begin after many Tottenham fans who gave Kane their blessing for him to leave only a few months now wish him gone.
Senior officials at Tottenham had been shocked at the way in which the team talisman, whose quiet life away from football is filled with a passion for golf and NFL, had acted in attempting to strong-arm the club into a sale. Kane’s desire to leave came as no surprise, though. Last summer, he held meetings at the training ground in offices overlooking the state-of-the-art training pitches and facilities, and explained how his ambitions meant he would need to depart the club he joined aged 11.
This was a new Kane, though the narrative had already been fed into public knowledge in an interview with Jamie Redknapp during the first lockdown in England last year. “I am an ambitious player, I want to improve, I want to get better, I want to become one of the top, top players,” Kane explained. “I have always said that if I don’t feel we are progressing as a team or going in the right direction, I am not someone to stay there for the sake of it.”
Howeever, the six-year contract Kane signed in 2018, which runs until 2024, meant he was not in a position to dictate the outcome.
Levy had come away from previous transfers with the reputation of a cold, ruthless negotiator. He is a man who is fond of cars and red wine but has little interest in small talk. Nine years ago, he engineered the sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid into a world-record transfer after taking negotiations to the final 48 hours of the window and demanding an extra £8.5m. “He is like Napoleon,” Martin Jol, the former Spurs manager, told The Sunday Times. “There is always a strategy. He waits and waits and he is tough.”
Jonathan Barnett, the founder of world-renowned Stellar agency group, represented Bale and described Levy as “hard” and the negotiations “hair-raising.” This time, Levy was on the other side of the table to Charlie Kane, Harry’s older brother who was taking his first steps as an intermediary, setting up an agency called CK66, after working alongside the group that negotiated Kane’s six-year deal, Unique Sports Management. Senior officials at Tottenham suspected Kane’s father, Pat, was the one truly in control and found the prospect of Kane’s 32-year-old brother taking on their master negotiator as highly amusing.
Kane was meant to have options. Chelsea and Manchester United were among the clubs that had approached CK66 over signing him this summer, but there was a clear path in Kane’s mind. He was so convinced that the move would happen that he held a lengthy conversation with a senior member of the City squad about how he would fit in and life under Guardiola.
Kane thought he had laid the groundwork for a move away from Spurs at the beginning of May, before he had gone public with his desire in an interview with Gary Neville’s YouTube show, The Overlap. Playing a round of golf, the pair discussed Kane’s future in which the striker insisted it would be he, and not Levy, who dictated his future as he admitted an “honest conversation” was needed.
Strutting down the fairways with his slicked-back fair hair, Kane laughed at Neville’s probing comments on his future but when the time came he made his message clear and firm. Asked if he was at a crossroads in his career, Kane replied: “I think it’s definitely a conversation to be had with the club. I’m sure that [Levy] will want to set out the plan of where he sees it but, ultimately, it’s going to be down to me and how I feel and what’s going to be best for me and my career. This season, I’m watching the Champions League, watching the biggest English teams doing amazing.”
Kane believed he had a way out. The previous summer, after Manchester City had expressed strong interest in signing him, Levy had convinced Kane to remain at the club. But Kane believed he had a gentleman’s agreement — a verbal understanding — with Levy that he would let him go if Tottenham did not qualify for the Champions League in two successive seasons.
Tottenham have continually denied that such an agreement ever existed and sources close to Levy suggest he would only ever agree to sell to a foreign club, as was the case with Luka Modric in 2012. Levy sold Croatian midfielder Modric to Real Madrid for £30m despite Chelsea offering £40m the previous summer and Modric publicly insisting they had a gentleman’s agreement.
Levy’s resolve to keep Kane was strengthened by his anger at the leak being made into the media before the end of the season, as Spurs were mathematically still capable of qualifying for the Europa League. It was a side to Kane they hadn’t seen. Tottenham were furious and saw it as a betrayal of his best friend, Ryan Mason, who had been called up to lead the first team from academy after Mourinho had been sacked a month earlier.
But Kane wanted to plant the seed before England met for the European Championships. He believed his appearance in the 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa that week would be his last for Spurs and that City would complete negotiations while he was with Gareth Southgate’s squad. In fact no serious talks were ever held during the Euros. A week after the final Kane had to wait a week before flying out to the Bahamas with wife Kate and their two young daughters. Charlie was getting married the following Sunday and Kane was best man.
The week after the wedding, The Sun was briefed that Levy had changed his mind on selling Kane and that the striker had informed wedding guests of his impending move to Manchester. The information was incorrect, but reflected a first attempt at getting City to make a move.
Knowing the deal was far from done, Kane and his family jetted off to the luxury Albany resort that looks over South West Bay’s crystal waters waiting for good news. None arrived.
The crucial week came at the beginning of August. At the exact time that Guardiola and his coaching staff began to believe the chances of signing Kane were disappearing, he made the move that sent disapproving groans among the fan groups. For the past two-and-a-half months, they had brushed off the news as rumour and conjecture but then Kane made the move that signalled his desperation.
Continued on next post.