The Ballon d’Or ceremony on Monday had been going for over three hours when they finally got around to handing out the men’s trophy to Harry Kane. The Bayern Munich striker was considered one of the odds-on favorites for the award, along with Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappé. But this article is not going to be about whether Kane deserved it. The Ballon d’Or judging criteria are bafflingly vague even among sporting accolades, and good cases can be made for a number of players, Kane included.1
What I’m interested in is the full arc of Kane’s career so far. His is the first generation of players to be fully covered by the data era in soccer, and these sorts of detailed retrospectives are now possible in a way they were not only a few years ago.
With a striker, you have to start with the goals, and this is a goal-scoring record that already places him among the best forwards of the last several decades.
But the entire arc of Kane’s career can be described in much more detail. And his arc was different from most of the others on the chart. From an unheralded prospect to a breakout star to a career reinvention following ankle injuries, Kane has made himself into an elite player with a series of key adaptations.
This graphic covers the three periods of Kane’s career that I want to walk through.
The story begins with a young player who came seemingly out of nowhere to establish himself among the best penalty-area finishers in football. It continues through a short period of injury-driven adversity which lead to Kane’s transformation into a combination creator and scorer. Finally, there are the big years at Bayern that won him this individual trophy.
Looking at one player’s career opens up a few different kinds of questions. We can see how analytics immediately identified Kane’s quality. His story also shows how players can add skills and adapt as they age, and how crucial that capacity for transformation is over a full career at the top of the game.2 Finally, Kane’s Bayern seasons raise again the question of context for football statistics. Was Kane better at Bayern or just playing in a more favorable environment? And what does that imply about the quality of his career so far?
Kane’s sudden breakout and first star seasons
Kane was not a top prospect in football until after he had already built up a Premier League track record. He got his first run of games in spring 2014 as a mostly unheralded youth player on a Tottenham Hotspur team playing out the string on a sixth-place campaign. In his first start on April 7 against Sunderland, Kane attempted eight shots. Within a couple of weeks the breakout seemed on, and by the end of the season he had 28 shots and about 5 xG in 545 senior minutes. He only scored three goals, but the underlying numbers heralded a future star.
