When Harry Kane leads England out against Ghana on Tuesday, there will be an extra edge of emotion, perhaps a strange sense that he has stepped into an American dream.
Kane has never been to the ‘Boston Stadium’, as it has been rebranded for the World Cup. But in its other name, Gillette Stadium, it is a profoundly important place to him. Because it is the home of his beloved New England Patriots. And it is the place where his hero and now friend Tom Brady, immortalised in 17 feet of bronze outside, made himself a god of modern sport. Today, Kane will finally get to step onto that same field.
This was the group fixture that most jumped out at Kane when the draw was made last December. “That is probably the one I am excited to go to,” he said last week. “That one will be pretty cool.”
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Kane has always loved coming to the United States, feels almost at home here, a connection with the national values, the sense of ambition, hard work and reward. He puts country music on the record player at the England team hotel, and went to see Ella Langley play on Friday night. He admires American sports, the confidence and openness with which American athletes speak, stemming from the honesty and candour of American culture. Kane went to baseball last week, watching Thomas Tuchel throw the first pitch at the Kansas City Royals. But his true American sporting passion is elsewhere.
Kane loves the NFL so much that when he was at Tottenham he ran a Fantasy Football competition for Spurs players and staff as the self-appointed commissioner. He often talks — far more seriously than people realise — about one day switching codes and becoming a kicker. And of course he loves the Patriots, who he has been watching and cheering on for as long as he has been a professional footballer himself.
But at the centre of all of this, the inspiration for Kane’s years of Patriots fandom, is Brady. You cannot understand Kane without understanding Brady, and the values that his story represents: determination, self-confidence, self-improvement, and above all the capacity to keep going, keep believing when written off by everyone else. Kane loves the Patriots because he loves Brady, not the other way round.
“It was mainly the NFL that I got into at quite a young age,” Kane explained last week. “And mainly because of Tom Brady. My love for that started from him.”
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More specifically, it started from an ESPN documentary called ‘The Brady 6’, first aired in April 2011, when Brady was only three Super Bowl wins in, and Kane was 17 and on loan at Leyton Orient. The documentary is about the 2000 NFL draft, when a 22-year-old Brady was selected as the 199th pick by the Patriots with six other quarterbacks chosen first. The documentary is about how the young Brady was written off by so many, and about those six quarterbacks who were drafted ahead of him.
The point is not just that Brady was underrated, it was that he was written off. Even when he played college football for the Michigan Wolverines he was widely seen as not sufficiently athletic to make it. And before that famous draft there was an NFL combine to assess the prospects. Brady was one of the slowest and slightest of the quarterbacks there. The widespread assumption was that he had no chance.
Of course, Brady went on to displace Drew Bledsoe to become the Patriots’ starting quarterback in the 2001 season. And then went on to win six Super Bowls with the Patriots, and a seventh with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the age of 43. He retired as the unambiguous greatest quarterback of all time.
Because Kane always believed in himself, even when nobody else did. To many it would have sounded irrational: how could someone not starring for Norwich City or Leicester City really believe that they could score goals for Tottenham in the Premier League? But true conviction can override almost everything else. And so when Kane studied Brady’s career, he saw himself. “When I was younger people didn’t always believe in me, they didn’t think I would make it to where I am now,” Kane told me in an interview for The Independent in 2017. “It is about that self-belief, that self-drive, that has got me to where I am now.”
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Back then Kane was only in his third season as a regular Tottenham starter. He was initially just another Patriots fan 3,000 miles from Foxboro, watching Brady clips on YouTube, staying up late at night to watch the games, tweeting his glee as Brady inspired a historic comeback in Super Bowl LI in 2017.
But Kane’s fame was growing. He was a burgeoning superstar for Tottenham, always trying to embody Brady’s ability to take pressure on his shoulders at difficult moments and win games by himself. He won the Golden Boot at the 2018 World Cup and the world started to take notice.
Super Bowl LIII came in February 2019 when Kane was out with an ankle injury. Kane and his wife were invited to Atlanta to attend, where they watched Brady’s sixth Super Bowl triumph. (Kane’s brother-in-law is also an NFL fan who contributed to the start of his fandom.) Afterwards they were invited as VVIPs to the Patriots’ exclusive afterparty, where Kane, proudly wearing his ‘BRADY 12’ jersey, posing for photographs with Brady and the other Patriots stars.
For years, Brady had been Kane’s hero, someone he dreamed of emulating. In the photos from that night he looked like what he was, a thrilled fan, delighted to be surrounded by his heroes. But from this point on, with Kane a star in his own sport, they were peers and then friends. Kane and Brady are in regular contact and have played golf together. They congratulate each other on Instagram for their successes.
Brady and Kane are now so close that Brady dropped into the England hotel in Kansas City before they flew to Boston just to wish Kane and the team well.
Even here and now, on the top of the world, Kane still looks back on the lessons he learned from Brady. “Seeing the way he went about his business, his journey from the start — when people didn’t expect much from him — to go on and be the greatest ever player in his sport is maybe reminiscent of me earlier in my career,” Kane said last week. “Having people doubt me and working hard enough to turn that around.”
As a big name in his own field, Kane is now rivalling even Sir Elton John as the Patriots’ most famous British fan. He is often seen at NFL games where his schedule allows. He conducted the coin toss at NFL games at Tottenham in 2019 and 2022 (and was booed both times).
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His own football commitments often get in the way of attending Patriots games in Europe (they are playing in Munich in November, on the day that England play Spain). But his Instagram output is full of jersey swaps and shout-outs, and he gives as much time as he can to supporting the team. Clearly in the world of sports marketing, Kane’s willingness to be the face of crossover content with the NFL is hugely valuable. Tottenham even brought out an NFL-style jersey in 2018 with ‘KANE 10’ on the back, selling for a mere £95.
But Kane’s continuing NFL fandom is not just a gimmick or a ploy to ‘break America’. It genuinely means a lot to him. Kane’s Fantasy Football league at Spurs saw him coordinate the draft. His close friend Eric Dier (a Philadelphia Eagles fan) would always play, but other than that the league was mainly made up of Tottenham staff. And the staff members were impressed by Kane’s willingness to do something so fun and so genuine with them. Beyond family and football, Kane’s two main focuses, golf is the only other hobby that really moves him.
And yet there has always been a suggestion that maybe Kane’s love of NFL could turn into more than that. Kane has often talked about the possibility of one day turning his back on the 11-a-side game and moving into NFL as a specialist kicker. People often laugh this off but speak to anyone who knows Kane and they will tell you that he is deadly serious about it.
Kane is well aware of the journey of Brandon Aubrey, the dead-eyed kicker for the Dallas Cowboys, who in his early 20s was a professional soccer player with Toronto FC. If he can make the switch then why can’t Kane? Aubrey told The Athletic recently that his biggest barrier was getting the opportunity.
“It’s definitely possible,” Aubrey says. “It’s just there’s only 32 jobs. So even if you have the ability, it’s trying to get somebody to give you an opportunity. That’s what took me the longest.”
But the prospect of Kane in the NFL would be so globally box-office he would not be short of offers. And the skills, the ones he has been honing his whole life, would stand up.
“If you strike a soccer ball a million times, it’s going to translate to striking a football,” Aubrey says. “You have got to figure out where to hit the football and how to shape your foot. The mental aspect of taking a set piece or a penalty is very similar to taking a field goal.”
But while the desire is real, there is no rush yet. Because there is another comparison to be drawn between Kane and Brady, now that Kane is long past the point of having to prove the doubters wrong. And that is the relentless drive that compelled Brady — and compels Kane — to keep learning, keep improving, keep re-imagining the game well into their 30s. Brady won four of his seven Super Bowls and all three NFL MVPs after his 30th birthday. Even when Kane was a young player who had won nothing, he saw how Brady approached his 30s as a model. “It shows how good he is, that he is never satisfied,” Kane told me in 2017. “Some people might win one or two, be happy, retire and enjoy life with a lot of money. But for him it’s all about winning.”
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Anyone who has watched Kane in recent years knows that he is still getting better by the week, as fit as ever but constantly improving his skill, his imagination, his range of finishes. He scored miracle goals last season — against Eintracht Frankfurt and Atalanta — that even he would not have conceived of or executed for Tottenham. Even now, at 32, he is still adding to his game. To watch Kane now is to feel in the presence of mastery.
David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker in 2000 that Philip Roth’s work in his 60s (when he wrote ‘American Pastoral’ and ‘The Human Stain’) was comparable to the “fleeting period in an athlete’s life when the vectors of his physical abilities and his mastery of the game — his experience, intelligence and imagination — meet at the highest point.” Gideon Haigh wrote in ‘On Warne’ that that description was true of Shane Warne’s performance in the 2005 Ashes, when at 35 years old he took 40 wickets at an average of 19.92. It is certainly true of Brady’s later years. And it is increasingly true of Kane too.
Brady won his final Super Bowl at 43 and Kane will want to stay at the top for as long as he can too. When you are this good at anything, why would you stop? He is not going to switch to the NFL any time soon. Nor will he get to use the Patriots’ dressing room, which is out of action for the World Cup.
For now at least, in Kane’s unceasing quest to be the Brady of football, proving the doubters wrong, working his way to the top, never ever looking back, he will have to content himself with gracing the same field.
