Harry Kane and the coach who kept picking him

North east London, autumn 1999. Ridgeway Rovers, the youth club that produced David Beckham a generation earlier, is holding its annual trials at Loughton rugby club. The coach in charge is Dave Bricknell, a Spurs supporter and lifelong football obsessive. He asks the six year olds who wants to go in goal. A small boy puts his hand up. It later turns out he is a striker.

A woman on the sideline walked over after a few minutes and told Bricknell quietly that the boy in goal played up front. Bricknell moved him outfield. He scored, then scored again. The boy's name was Harry Kane. He stayed at Ridgeway for two seasons, then Arsenal signed him into their academy at seven.

The Arsenal year

Kane spent about two years in Arsenal's academy. The coach who released him was Roy Massey, then head of youth coaching at Hale End. Massey has been open about the decision. Kane played up front alongside Benik Afobe, who was quick and sharp and scoring goals. Kane was a technician, and by comparison he looked slow. He had a late July birthday, which put him nearly a year behind the other boys physically. In Massey's later phrase, they did not think he would be up to Arsenal Football Club.

Kane's own memory of it is precise. He was released at nine. He was one of the smallest boys in the group. Liam Brady, then Arsenal's academy director, said in an Italian newspaper interview years later that the club had made a mistake. Kane was, in Brady's phrase, a bit chubby and not particularly athletic. What neither man could see at the time was the growth spurt that was still five years away.

Back to Ridgeway, then a hat-trick against Spurs

Kane went back to Ridgeway Rovers. Bricknell, who had by then become a Spurs scout on the side, kept picking him. For a year and a half, Kane played park football on Saturday mornings, coached by the same man who had put him in goal at six. Tottenham looked at him during that period and passed. Watford took him on trial and were about to offer a contract. Then, in a Watford shirt, playing against Tottenham, Kane scored a hat-trick. Tottenham signed him almost immediately, at eleven.

The academy years, and the podium he was not on

At Tottenham's academy over the following years, the coaches who spent the most time with Kane included John McDermott, Chris Ramsey, Les Ferdinand, Alex Inglethorpe and Tim Sherwood. Inglethorpe, now director of Liverpool's academy, has been the most honest about how they saw Kane at fourteen. If asked to name the group's gold medallist, he has said, he would not have picked Kane. He would not have put Kane on the podium at all. Kane could finish. He was not strong in the air. He was not sharp on his left foot. What he did have was a habit of coaching himself between sessions.

The growth spurt came at fourteen. Kane went from being one of the smallest in the age group to one of the tallest. His touch and his finishing were already in place. What he needed was time, and time in a first team shirt. Between January 2011 and the end of the 2012 to 13 season, Tottenham sent him out on loan four times.

Four loans in two and a half years

At Leyton Orient in League One, aged seventeen, he scored five goals in eighteen appearances. He learned from Scott McGleish, a thirty six year old striker in the same dressing room who used his own time to coach the boy through the week. A year later, at Millwall in the Championship under Kenny Jackett, Kane scored nine goals in twenty seven games and was voted the club's young player of the year. Millwall stayed up.

The following season at Norwich City in the Premier League, under Chris Hughton, he played twice, broke a metatarsal, and came home. In the January after that, at Leicester in the Championship under Nigel Pearson, he sat on the bench behind Chris Wood, David Nugent and, in one now famous team photograph, Jamie Vardy. None of these loans looked, at the time, like a career being built.

In the middle of the Millwall spell, a Tottenham scout told Harry Redknapp the club should pull Kane out. Tim Sherwood, then coaching the reserves, intervened, and Kane finished the loan. In Pearson's team photograph from Leicester's last match of that season, Kane is one of five substitutes on the bench. Two years later, three of those five would be Premier League regulars.

The manager who wouldn't sell him

In December 2013, André Villas-Boas left Tottenham and Sherwood took over. On 7 April 2014, Sherwood gave Kane his first Premier League start, against Sunderland. Kane scored. He started the following week against West Brom, and scored again. Sherwood said afterwards that the decision had felt overdue. Roberto Soldado was ahead of Kane on paper, and nobody wanted Soldado to succeed more than Sherwood did, but Kane was outperforming him in training every day.

Sherwood also, by his own later account, blocked a plan inside the club to sell Kane in the summer of 2014. When Mauricio Pochettino arrived at the end of that summer, Kane was already installed as the striker. He scored twenty one Premier League goals in the 2014 to 15 season, won the PFA Young Player of the Year, and never dropped out of the team again.

What the coach at nine could not see

By the summer of 2023, Kane had scored 280 goals for Tottenham and become England's all time leading scorer. He moved to Bayern Munich for an initial fee of around one hundred million euros. In his first Bundesliga season he scored thirty six league goals, won the Torjägerkanone and the European Golden Shoe. As of this year, he has scored more than eighty goals for England in fewer than one hundred and twenty caps.

Roy Massey, the Arsenal coach who released him at nine, has said in interviews since that he took a lesson from the Kane case. You do not release a boy at eleven or twelve for a lack of pace. You wait until he has gone through puberty. If the pace still is not there afterwards, then you make a decision. Kane's story is a story about that gap. What a coach thinks he is watching at nine is not always what will be there at nineteen.

The through line, though, is not the academies. It is the man who was still coaching him at Ridgeway after Arsenal let him go. Dave Bricknell was a Spurs supporter with a Saturday morning team in Chingford. He put a six year old in goal, moved him outfield when someone tipped him off, and kept picking him for the two seasons before Arsenal came in. He kept picking him for the year and a half after Arsenal let him go. The scouts and academy directors take turns in the story. The park coach is the constant.