Harry Kane has achieved footballing greatness by winning the Ballon d’Or, but at 33, his journey to the top is marked by setbacks before he reached the pinnacle of the world’s game.
The England skipper’s records speak for themselves: he is the Three Lions’ top goalscorer, holds the joint-highest caps for his nation, and is Spurs’ record scorer, to name a few.
But to beat the likes of Spain’s Lamine Yamal and France’s Kylian Mbappe at the star-studded London Palladium ceremony, Kane had to put in the hard yards and graft his way to the top.
His professional career began in the lower divisions of English football, with loan spells at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City, and Leicester City.
“He went round the houses with his development, a lot of loans, because I felt it was his best way to develop quicker because I don’t agree with under-21 Premier League football,” former Spurs boss Tim Sherwood previously told GB News in July.
“I decided to take the loan option with him, even if it wasn’t plain sailing and there weren’t obstacles in the way because there certainly were; I just felt it was the best development pathway for him.”
Kane joined Orient at the age of 17, scoring five times in 18 games, before moving to Millwall, where he found the net nine times.
After a spell at Norwich that ended with a serious foot injury, the striker moved to Leicester City in the Championship, where he joined future England teammate Jamie Vardy.
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Following the four loan moves, Sherwood opted to bring Kane back and throw him into the Spurs set-up, giving him his first start in 2014.
“I made a conscious decision together that no more loans – it’s either you play for Tottenham, or you might have to look for a career elsewhere. And it just fell into place for him,” Sherwood told the People’s Channel.
Kane became a regular starter and soon Tottenham’s talisman, going on to score 280 times in 435 appearances.
Sherwood explained what separated the 2026 Ballon d’Or winner from the rest was his attitude, work rate, and determination to be the best.
He said: “A lot of players have technical ability, and he certainly had that. I think players are born with physical attributes, but you’re not born a natural goalscorer, a wonderful vision No10, or a hard-tackling midfielder.
“You have to work at those traits, and he certainly knew what he had to work on, and we used to put the sessions on not just for him, but for all of them young boys to develop the individual rather than the team.
“It really doesn’t matter if the youth team wins; it really doesn’t. It matters that you’re producing players who are getting closer and closer towards the first team, and he was doing that in leaps and bounds, in my opinion.
“But he was getting overlooked, and I felt when I used to look at him, and we used to have chats, he didn’t feel like his chance would never come. [But] I think he had that inner belief that he felt that it would. A lot of other managers didn’t see that in him, but I obviously spent a lot of time around him, so I knew. I was quite confident that he could make the breakthrough.”
Despite not winning a trophy with Spurs, the individual accolades racked up speak for themselves in showing Kane’s qualities.
He won three Premier League Golden Boots, Premier League Player of the Month seven times, Spurs’ Player of the Year three times, and has been named in the PFA Premier League Team of the Year six times.
After leaving Tottenham in 2023, the England captain took his game to another level, winning two Bundesliga titles, a DFB Pokal, two German Supercups, and has been the Bundesliga top scorer for three straight years.
“It’s really difficult to imagine that he could be where he is now, because I think any young coach who had a young player, a superstar player in the end, it’s easy for him to say: ‘Yeah, we knew he’d be there all along’,” Sherwood told GB News through BetGoodwin.
“He keeps ticking off those individual accolades, and he’s managed to be able to win as a team with Bayern. And one thing I should say is that he’s always been a team man. It is the team, and then Harry Kane second.”
In the summer, the striker guided England to their best World Cup finish since winning the competition 60 years ago, and a trophy for his nation is the last piece of the puzzle for Kane in his stunning career.
“He would gladly hand [the Ballon d’Or] to Michael Olise if he knew that England could win the World Cup, because that’s the sort of mentality he is,” Sherwood said.
The England captain will roll the dice again with the Three Lions in the summer of 2028 at the European Championships, hosted on home soil.
Kane’s victory last night writes his name among the greatest English players of all time, joining Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan, and Michael Owen.
The debate now is whether the striker is the best English footballer of all time, as he nears 100 goals for the Three Lions and is set to take the appearance record.
Sherwood said: “Harry is one of those players you know is an ultimate professional; he will do everything he can to help the team out on any given day, and if he has a bad game, which players do, even superstar players, then it’ll be an honest performance that he’s giving you.
“There’ll be no self-indulgence in it, and that is the measure of a man.”
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