Sports
Harry Kane is tearing up the Bundesliga at Bayern Munich. What’s next for England’s No. 9?
The 2020 documentary “All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur” provided a revealing glimpse into Harry Kane‘s psyche. In a one-on-one chat with then-manager Jose Mourinho, Kane said: “When you’re at a club like Tottenham, we’ve done well and I’ve done well, but I want to be [Cristiano Ronaldo] or [Lionel Messi].”
Some might have scoffed at the English striker’s ambition as shown on screen, but despite the constant change after Mauricio Pochettino’s departure as Spurs manager in 2019, Kane’s brilliant numbers never waned. His blistering start to the 2025-26 campaign with Bayern Munich (18 goals in 10 matches), is on par with Messi and Ronaldo.
Take a deeper look at his overall game, however, and his gaudy scoring stats are just scratching the surface. He has never been more influential in the buildup phase of play. The goals remain a constant, but he now plays a role at the start, middle and end of Bayern’s attacks. Kane is evolving, and that evolution is contributing to perhaps his best season yet.
With Saturday’s Der Klassiker vs. Borussia Dortmund on the horizon (12:30 p.m. ET, ESPN+), let’s examine how his role has changed from his days at Spurs, what it could mean for England at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and his future at the club level.
Filling a Musiala-shaped hole
When star midfielder Jamal Musiala picked up an injury during the Club World Cup, it left a creative void. Kane has taken up the mantle.
“When Jamal’s playing, it’s a bit different. Getting the ball off defenders, driving, when we were playing together, it was better for him to go and do that,” Kane explained after Bayern’s win over Eintracht Frankfurt. “This season, it’s allowed me to play a little bit deeper, use my qualities in that sense of turning and playing it forward, then arriving later in the box.”
The goal he scored in that game saw Kane occupy Frankfurt’s defensive line before peeling back close to Joshua Kimmich just ahead of the center circle. When the ball was played up to Serge Gnabry near the edge of the penalty area, the striker moved forward from the middle of the pitch, slotting into a gap created by him initially dropping for a trademark finish from outside the box.
But Kane’s game is about more than just arriving late to score goals. He’s now a crucial cog in Bayern’s buildup, often seen deep in his own half to receive the ball from his own defense.
In the ninth minute of the same game, Kane received the ball near the sideline in the left-back position, wriggled past two challengers and found Gnabry in space.
The surprising thing is how much of a regularity such Luka Modric-esque moves are becoming. Players get sucked into following Kane so far into Bayern’s half that he can find another attacker in space as he holds the ball up.
He initiates the moves, and he completes them. Both his inevitable goal scoring and his playmaking ability are thriving as a result.
How Kane’s game has evolved
Kane was always more than a goal poacher: it just took some time to discover his alternative capabilities.
At the beginning of his career and in his first two seasons in Germany, Kane’s game centered on creating chances or scoring them, but mainly scoring. He amassed many shots and touches in the box under Pochettino, and shades of his ball-carrying and ability to bring others into the game appeared near the end of his Tottenham Hotspur spell.
Kane’s heat map from his last two seasons at Tottenham, depicting where he was most active, helps show how his game has changed. More color appears in his own half, near the center circle, or in half-spaces (the channels between center backs and fullbacks) away from goal.
In his first two seasons at Bayern Munich, his actions took place almost entirely in the opponent’s half, as he leaned more into his talents as a finisher.
Looking at Kane’s heat map for the 2025-26 season, spots emerge all over the pitch, with highlighted areas deep in his own half.
Statistics show that this season, Kane is back to combining the best of his abilities as an attacker and a creator. His progressive passes are as high as they were in 2021-22 and 2023-24, while he has never had more touches in his own box than this season.
It’s clearly working. “Arriving late,” as Kane puts it, has seen his expected assists and shot-creating actions rise. He has provided a solution to Bayern’s shortage of creativity in midfield, as Kimmich and Leon Goretzka aren’t the most inventive midfielders. (All stats below are per 90 minutes.)
His link-up play, hold-up ability and chance-creating talents were underrated during his time in north London, but in Bavaria, that part of his game has been elevated. It is now being used in spaces where you’d typically see Kimmich, and it’s the absolute best of both worlds.
Looking ahead to the World Cup
Kane, England and coach Thomas Tuchel will be determined to get their hands on an elusive trophy this summer, and they shouldn’t be afraid to use the “new” Harry Kane to do so. Ominously for the rest of the competition, England might have started doing this already.
Against Serbia, while he spent most of the game occupying their back five, Kane would often peel off and look for the ball deeper.
In the early stages of the World Cup, Tuchel could opt for Kane in this role to break teams down. With Kane dragging a center back of out of position, faster players such as Anthony Gordon or Bukayo Saka can be played in behind. In the latter stages (should England reach them), England might have less of the ball and use him more like a target man, as they did in the first minute of the Serbia game when a long ball was sent into the box for Kane to nod down.
Kane’s versatility could unlock defenses that sit deep and elevate other attackers. However, he still needs to be the striker who gets into the box, as there isn’t another striker in the national side with his finishing ability. Lucky for England, he can do both. The conundrum for Tuchel will be balancing both roles.
What’s next at club level?
With Kane’s Bayern Munich contract set to expire in 2027, both club and player are thinking about what happens next. Bayern’s sporting director has hinted at an extension, and the longer a new contract isn’t signed, the more rumors and conjecture will swirl.
We’ve taken the liberty of looking ahead for Kane, and his next step could be to settle unfinished business in England. Kane has played down a return home, but the motive would be clear: to break Alan Shearer’s goal-scoring record (260; Kane has 213) and attempt to win a Premier League title.
– Darke: Tuchel’s tough love on Bellingham could help England and the player at World Cup
– Ogden: Premier League big issues: Will Amorim, Ange last? Is Salah fading?
– Connelly: The best teams in Europe right now: Bayern, Kane setting the tone
Manchester City have Erling Haaland, and unless a team comes along to sign him out of his massive contract, he won’t be displaced. But what if manager Pep Guardiola combined Haaland and Kane?
Guardiola likes to play with four attackers and one holding midfielder behind Haaland, but those four attackers float around the pitch. One of those players could be Kane, as defenses wouldn’t know who to mark.
The downside could be that it exacerbates some of the out-of-possession issues City have had in their press this season. The forward line has left huge gaps as City have pressed aggressively. Kane isn’t a bad presser, but if he’s asked to drop deeper, we have no evidence to suggest whether his work without the ball would be sufficient in this new position, particularly in terms of tackling and closing players down.
Teams are smart about exploiting space. Guardiola couldn’t have both players pressing as forwards. Still, most of City’s game will be played with them dictating the tempo, so the focus will be on what Kane brings in possession. It’s inventive, but with Guardiola, it’s wild enough to work.
In terms of other Premier League clubs, Liverpool have signed three attackers and are trying to figure out how they fit. Arsenal are ruled out because of Kane’s Spurs allegiance, which leaves a possible romantic return to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. After getting a taste of his first piece of silverware, though, Kane returning to his old club or moving to Chelsea or Manchester United would be a step down.
Elsewhere in Europe, with the lack of funds in Serie A, Kane’s next challenge could be tackling LaLiga with Real Madrid or Barcelona. Neither the Catalan giants nor Real Madrid have a pure No. 9 with a physical and aerial presence, besides Robert Lewandowski at Barcelona, whose contract expires in summer 2026. Since Joselu left Real Madrid, Los Blancos have missed the player, as Thibaut Courtois highlighted last season. “We put in a lot of crosses, but this year we don’t have Joselu, a natural striker up front,” he said after being knocked out of the Champions League by Arsenal.
Coach Xabi Alonso has a vast array of talent in attack that he likes to rotate. Adding Kane would give the Spaniard an even bigger selection headache. The Bayern forward isn’t accustomed to that, and Lewandowski’s expiring contract and Kylian Mbappé‘s tremendous form make Barcelona a more attractive option. It’s hard to envision Kane combining with Lamine Yamal, Raphinha and Pedri and not being successful, as Barça create plenty but are often wasteful in front of goal. As the starting striker, Kane would be a perfect fit in Barcelona’s swaggering attack.
A longer stay in Munich?
With his current form, ability and profile as one of the world’s best players, Kane is a suitable fit for a club that challenges for a league title and the Champions League every season. It’s why he says he’s open to a new contract with Bayern Munich.
“In terms of staying longer [at Bayern], I could definitely see that,” he said Oct. 6. “I spoke openly a couple of weeks ago that I have not had those conversations with Bayern yet, but if they were to arise I would be willing to talk and have an honest conversation.”
Despite being a tantalizing prospect for many clubs, Kane has repeatedly spoken of how happy he is in Germany — maybe to the point where he himself didn’t expect to enjoy it this much.
The feeling has always been that he would eventually return to England, but after winning his first Bundesliga title, it’s clear his focus is on winning as much as possible in Bavaria. With the astonishing way he has adapted to his new role, who’s to say he couldn’t extend his contract and become a Bayern Munich legend?
Sports
OutKick attends Dodgers-sponsored awards show honoring trans swimmer Lia Thomas: Here’s what happened
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HOLLYWOOD – Trans swimmer Lia Thomas has resurfaced after largely disappearing from public view.
On Thursday night in Los Angeles, the former UPenn swimmer, born William Thomas, arrived at the Serra on Vine, wearing a purple dress and stilettos — standing about 6-foot-5 — to accept the “Voice of Inspiration Award” at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards.
The event, organized by the nonprofit Rainbow Labs, was sponsored in part by Los Angeles sports organizations such as the Dodgers and LA Football Club.
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Penn Quakers swimmer Lia Thomas finishes eighth in the 100 freestyle at the NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 19, 2022. (Brett Davis/USA TODAY Sports)
Leading up to Thomas’ speech, a mention of the Dodgers’ sponsorship drew light applause from the crowd, though no one from the team spoke during the program.
LAFC, Dodgers Among Those Backing Thomas And LGBT Activists
After mingling with the crowd and two drag performances, Lia Thomas took the stage to accept the Voice of Inspiration Award and proceeded to double down on finding purpose in trans activism.
But before that, a video montage played about Thomas, tracing the path from competing on the men’s team as William Thomas, to entering the women’s competition in 2022 as Lia Thomas.
Thomas was portrayed as an athlete fighting for acceptance while facing backlash.
“Incredible shout out to everybody at Rainbow Labs for bringing me here and everybody and putting this all together,” Thomas started.
Thomas, 26, accepted the “Voice of Inspiration Award” at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night. (Alejandro Avila/OutKick)
“It makes me very emotional because I remember all too well not that long ago being 18 and just realizing that I’m trans.”
Thomas, 26, continued, “And feeling so excited at the prospect of being able to be who I am, but feeling so terrified to take those steps because I didn’t know any other trans people. I didn’t — I barely knew what being trans meant.
“Being open and out in myself felt like this impossible mountain to climb, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to do it.”
Thomas credited having trans mentors who helped the swimmer reconcile a trans identity with athletics.
Thomas said, “It’s only because of so many amazing, amazing trans mentors that I was able to find that strength and that courage to go out and be myself and finally reconcile my ‘transness’ and my swimmer identity and be able to compete as a now trans woman.”
Lia Thomas Calls Trans Platform ‘My Purpose’
After Thomas joined the competition, female athletes, including OutKick’s Riley Gaines, spoke up to denounce men playing in women’s sports.
During the 2024 campaign trail, then-President-elect Donald Trump proved to be a big supporter of Gaines and other women, raising concerns about competing against men.
Their influence led to Trump’s executive order banning biological males from competing in women’s sports.
The president even paused federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over allowing Thomas to compete with women, though eventually UPenn became the third school to reject the president’s funding conditions.
“And I’m so grateful for them — for those people and those mentors — and I’m so happy that organizations like Rainbow Labs exist,” Thomas added, saying people reached out on social media with “messages of violence.”
Thomas, 26, accepted the “Voice of Inspiration Award” at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night. ( Alejandro Avila/OutKick)
“If I had had an organization like that as a kid to give me the knowledge and language to describe my transness, how important that would have been. Because I faced a lot of harassment. I got a lot of messages of violence against me in my Instagram comments and DMs. I didn’t know what to do.”
Speakers throughout the night cast LGBT Americans as living under oppression and celebrated transgender-identifying people as the event’s heroes.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, and Thomas’ inclusion has also sparked controversy over allowing men to share women’s locker rooms.
Thomas remains undeterred, even after all the controversy, calling a platform as an influential trans figure “my purpose.”
EX-UPENN SWIMMER LIA THOMAS TO RECEIVE ‘VOICE OF INSPIRATION’ AWARD AT DODGERS-SPONSORED EVENT
Penn transgender swimmer Lia Thomas speaks to her coach after winning the 500-meter freestyle during an NCAA college swimming meet with Harvard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Jan. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)
“But I owe so much to those mentors before me that it sort of was clear that I had to be that next beacon in a line of torches going back hundreds of years of trans people. That was my purpose. That was what I was here to do,” Thomas stated.
“And so to be able to be that next light for people is an honor I can’t describe. It means more than anything. And I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do that. And so thank you all so much.”
Since Thomas’ inclusion in collegiate women’s swimming (presided over by the NCAA), women’s rights activists like Riley Gaines — having competed against Thomas — have called out the loss of opportunities and awards for women due to the inclusion of trans athletes, which networks like ESPN have promoted.
Lia Thomas Was Quiet, But Won’t Go Away
As more people spoke up against Thomas and similar cases, like trans volleyball player Blaire Fleming, Thomas started to lose some of the favor awarded by the media.
The tone of the evening reflected an effort to move mainstream American culture toward a fuller embrace of LGBT identity and activism.
Also speaking at the event, on behalf of an LA Football Club group, spokeswoman Daisy Chavez shared a commitment to supporting “queer folks” within the Los Angeles community.
“We are a community of queer fans, local leaders, supporters, and activists of the Los Angeles Football Club. And if you don’t know, we follow sports because we’ve always been here. We’ve been athletes, we’ve been fans, we’ve been lovers of the sports.
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“And so our presence with this club reminds not just the club, the community, but the world that we’ve always been here. And so we cheer, full of joy and love for our local community, but also we represent for our queer folks, and we’re so proud of being there every step of the way.”
Once all the awards were presented — one also went to a gender-nonconforming trans female named “Alok” — the event ended with a stripper show.
For an evening devoted to inspiration, the show’s final acts offered a strikingly different kind of message.
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Rodman is expected to sit out U.S. women’s national team camp but could be back ahead of the NWSL playoffs.
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MUNICH — Modern football hype prefers it when we place everything in a convenient box that doesn’t always reflect reality. I suppose it’s understandable.
Covering the German game as a commentator, however, you quickly resist the temptation to make Bayern Munich vs. Borussia Dortmund what advertising moguls might have us do with a fixture that has come to be known as der Klassiker.
It doesn’t lend itself to a simplistic “clash of the titans” narrative. Nuance and context are needed when understanding what this confrontation is.
Yes, it is the most-high profile Bundesliga fixture that the wider world often associates with the league and it features two heavyweight clubs, indeed the two most avidly followed in the Bundesrepublik. The action — as was the case last season in a pair of thrilling score draws — can be highly absorbing in front of some of the largest crowds in the world and offers a window into who is currently the best team in Germany.
However, this is not the German rivalry to end all rivalries along the lines of Real Madrid against Barcelona, Celtic vs. Rangers or Galatasaray against Fenerbahce. Nor should we pretend it is. Bayern fans simply don’t obsess on a weekly Schadenfreude basis over BVB, and the same is true of those of a schwarzgelb persuasion with regard to the Rekordmeister.
Some would argue that calling it a rivalry is stretching it, although it is certainly a Spitzenduell (a duel of top teams).
The fixture began to gain prominence in the 1990s with the threat to Bayern from the industrial west under the aegis of Ottmar Hitzfeld, who would later take his coaching talents to Munich. Back then, Bayern were not as dominant as they are now and players didn’t view Bayern-BVB as a cut above other matches.
Arguably the greatest era for this tussle was during Jürgen Klopp’s time in charge of BVB. Dortmund lifting the Meisterschale in 2011 and 2012 added spice and tension and it set the table for the all-German 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. This time, Bayern were victorious in a nailbiter.
The fact remains that BVB have come up empty in their Bundesliga title quest since 2012, most painfully in 2023, when they failed to play the considerable cards in their deck and gifted Bayern a winning hand on the final day.
In the past two seasons, der Klassiker, while still the most watched fixture in the Oberhaus, has played second fiddle on a competitive basis to Bayern’s meetings with 2024 champions Bayer Leverkusen.
This term, there’s no doubt the pecking order has shifted again. Bayern, under Vincent Kompany appear to have one of their most formidable formulas in several years. It raises the question: Can anyone get close to them in the Bundesliga?
The evidence of the first six matchdays is that BVB are likely the only team with a chance of preventing a Bayern runaway. They lack Bayern’s overall quality but there is a tenacity and defensive resilience about Dortmund in their current guise under Niko Kovac that makes you think they could, on a very good day, end Bayern’s flawless record in all competitions so far this season.
I find there is a general erroneous belief among casual fans that Bayern almost always beat BVB, and certainly in Munich. In fact, Dortmund’s past two visits have produced a 2-0 win and a 2-2 draw, the latter well merited with the pressure on to lift themselves up into a Champions League place against the odds.
Bayern will be firm favorites on Saturday, though. How could it be otherwise considering their 10 straight competitive wins to start the season with 38 goals scored?
The loose ends from Kompany’s first campaign at the helm have been tightened up to the point where it’s difficult to discern a weakness. Even with Jamal Musiala, Alphonso Davies and Hiroki Ito still on the sidelines, and Thomas Müller no longer part of the equation, Bayern are markedly better than they were up and down the pitch when the Belgian took over.
It’s natural to highlight Harry Kane, whose tally of 11 goals from six Bundesliga matches so far puts him on a pace to obliterate Robert Lewandowski‘s 41-goal single-season record. I’ve spoken at length in this space about Kane’s increased versatility with adept long-range passing and dropping into the Musiala position for increased effectiveness part of his repertoire.
But it’s also worth taking note of Bayern’s improved team statistics in the running and sprinting department. Rarely does the team with the highest possession percentage lead the field in distance covered, a category normally reserved for a team designed to play gegen den Ball (against the ball).
Dortmund don’t play with an especially high line and it’s to be expected that their Dreierkette (back three) will follow similar tactics at the Allianz Arena, while hoping to make the Umschaltmomente (transitional moments) count. This plays to the strength of the speedy Karim Adeyemi and natural line leader Serhou Guirassy.
To me, this encounter doesn’t actually need a vapid wrestling style introduction. It’s surely enough to make it about perfect Bayern and unbeaten Dortmund, first vs. second, on a collision course and an engrossing football contest.
And the German language has the perfect word for the occasion: richtungsweisend (pointing the way ahead).
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