In the capricious world of youth development, all coaches have hunches.
Some players give off a strong impression that they have a chance. Others less so. It is a notoriously inexact science. Sometimes, the ones you least expect come through, and those likeliest to succeed disappear.
Still, the hunches continue — it is impossible not to react to them, especially when every season, with every group of hopefuls, there will be judgement time. Retain or release. It comes around every year or two and essentially pits young team-mates against each other. It’s a nerve-racking, brutal experience for any age group.
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When Harry Kane was at Arsenal’s academy, nobody had much of a hunch about him. There were no obvious signs of the excellence that would blossom eventually. The forwards in his age group were more athletic, more prolific, more advanced. Benik Afobe and Chuks Aneke, who both went on to play for England’s junior teams and have professional careers, were the budding prospects who shone.
Dan Buck coached them all when they were at Arsenal. “On Saturday mornings, I’d do a session with the under-nines who weren’t selected for the matches on Sundays, and Harry ended up being with that squad a lot more than he would’ve liked,” he recalls. “Benik and Chuks would rock up on a Sunday and score about seven each, and poor Harry would get five minutes.”
The conundrum with academy football is that you are obliged to judge a player’s future on what they are doing today, without the help of a crystal ball. There is an increasing amount of sports science being used to assess young footballers and their physical potential but that was not part of the picture for young Kane, Afobe and Aneke.
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Besides, that still doesn’t account for the myriad other factors: mentality, social and emotional intelligence, the capacity to learn, injuries, luck, and so on. But the bottom line was Kane’s Arsenal experience was cut short. He returned to grassroots football by the time he was an under-11 and, after a couple of seasons outside the academy system regaining his confidence, he showed enough for someone else to take a chance on him. Watford were in the mix, and Tottenham Hotspur, who had already taken a look and declined, jumped back in.
Even so, few at the time felt they had unearthed a rare gem, the kind of prospect you get a hunch about. Nothing came easily. He was seldom regarded as the best of the bunch, all the way to when he got to under-21 level. When his case was pushed by the coaching staff for inclusion in first-team training at Tottenham, the idea was rebuffed. Even then, his ceiling was far from obvious.
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For Buck, it just goes to show how football’s tales of the unexpected can surprise everybody. “You’ve got a lad that nobody really fancied who’s gone on to be the best No 9 in the world,” he says. “It’s a mad story. Not one you forget.”
Kane joined Arsenal in pre-academy as an under-eight. Clubs are not allowed to sign a prospect officially until they reach under-nine. That’s a significant milestone, the first opportunity to be properly committed to a club. Before that, some talented kids find themselves ferried by their parents around four or five different clubs per week for training to keep options open. Even pre-academy is fiercely competitive.
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He may not have been the most imposing physically, but the quality that caught the eye about Kane was his finishing. Nico Yennaris has known Kane for a long time. As well as being team-mates in the Arsenal academy, they played for the same Sunday side: revered Chingford outfit Ridgeway Rovers, whose alumni also include David Beckham, Andros Townsend and Dwight Gayle.
“We were partners up front for Ridgeway,” Yennaris says. “’H’ has just always been able to score goals.” That ability to put the ball in the back of the net is the single most memorable quality about the young Kane. “He wasn’t the loudest; he was pretty quiet,” Yennaris says. “In many ways, he was just a normal kid — but he was always, always scoring goals.”
That knack led to him being picked up by Arsenal as a seven-year-old. While Kane starred for Ridgeway, he was rarely the centre of attention in his short time with Arsenal. “When we were younger, our team had Benik and Chuks,” says Yennaris. “They were the two guys who were most spoken about. I’m sure H would say the same thing if you asked him.”
Aneke, now at Charlton Athletic, is too modest to single himself out as the cream of that particular crop. “Benik was the one scoring all the goals,” says Aneke. “He was the one they earmarked for stardom.”
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The greatest issue for the young Kane was his physique. “H had good technique but he wasn’t particularly athletic at that age,” says Aneke. “He was small, not particularly quick, a bit podgy. It was hard for his attributes to really shine.” Nevertheless, there were moments when Kane’s talent would shine through. “I remember him doing a bicycle kick, which was unusual at that age,” says Aneke. “It just stuck in my head. I always remembered his name.”
Are moments of magic enough to convince? As it is, youth coaches always have to ask themselves constant questions. Are the most advanced physically going to maintain their advantage when others catch up? Are the most gifted going to have sufficient work ethic to keep pushing? Buck says he learned a significant lesson about how to assess young players from Kane’s slow burn of a route to the top.
“Harry is one of the players who’s taught me more than any other about youth development,” he says. “Particularly when it comes to players with physical limitations. At that time, people didn’t see what he was trying to do — they only saw what he was able to do. Harry was trying things, but his body couldn’t do it. Once you’ve done this job for a long time, you learn you need to look at intent as much as you look at impact.”
Inevitably, the young Kane’s belief suffered. “What you see with lads who go through this is they lose confidence quickly,” explains Buck. “Their team-mates lose confidence in them, They don’t get the ball as often — it’s a bit of a negative spiral.”
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As Kane struggled for recognition in his preferred role as a striker, he experimented with other positions. “He was even a goalkeeper for us at some point,” says Aneke. “I think Roy Massey (former academy manager) saw Harry’s dad, who’s a big boy, and thought, ‘We’ll try you in goal’,” chuckles Buck. “Alex Welsh was the goalkeeper coach at the time and gave him a go, but he wasn’t the best. I think Harry was mentally done at that point.”
When Kane was released from Arsenal at nine, his team-mates had little sense of the player he would go on to become.
“At that age, every year there are new additions and a few who drop out,” explains Aneke. “I started at under-seven — by the time we got to under-16, it was just me, Benik and Nico who were left from the under-nines. You’re just glad to keep your spot. It’s like a conveyor belt. If you’re not good enough, then someone will take your place. You have to produce.”
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Liam Brady was Arsenal’s head of youth development at the time. He had been one of the club’s most successful homegrown players and took great care in looking after the next generation. The retain or release periods were torturous, and delivering bad news to hopeful boys and their parents was the worst part of his job. He trusted his coaches to offer their best judgment. He understands it is the nature of the environment that some decisions don’t work out as expected.
That is inevitable when dealing with humans, particularly at such a delicate time of their development — pre-, during, and post-adolescence — which is a very unpredictable experience at diverse rates and times for everyone. These are decisions made in real time, not in hindsight.
“Judging young players at 14 or 15 is hard enough,” Brady says. “You can have positive thoughts that kids might make it, but sometimes it is the ones you least expect. The view after a couple of years was that he didn’t feel quite up to the level some of his peers were showing.
“Unfortunately, there are only so many boys you can keep. The Premier League doesn’t allow you to sign as many young players as you want, so the staff had to make a decision. He wasn’t the shining light then that he is now.”
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Brady commends Kane for the remarkable character he showed to bounce back (and it would not be the first time he would need to keep going when opportunities looked limited).
“Some kids who are not the best put in the hardest graft and get rewarded,” he says. “That kid had so many knockbacks, including being told at nine or 10 that Arsenal were not going to keep him on. I used to watch him as he got older in the reserves when we played derbies at Boreham Wood and Stevenage and he didn’t look to be a potential superstar. Normally with players who become as brilliant as him, it is evident by the time they are 17 or 18. It wasn’t apparent then. Everybody got it wrong until his major breakthrough at Tottenham after several loan spells.
“Maybe it made him more determined. It is an admirable thing. Some kids get a knockback like that and it damages their confidence so much they don’t want to play anymore.”
A disappointed Kane went back to playing Sunday league football with Ridgeway Rovers.
“When I returned to Ridgeway, it gave me the chance to carry on playing football, carry on staying fit, get the enjoyment back, and deal with the disappointment of being released,” said Kane last year. “I was back with friends, scoring loads of goals and keeping that love of the game going. When you are that young, you don’t know how that kind of disappointment will take its toll on a young kid, so it was good to have that. I was back at Ridgeway for about a year to 18 months and I loved being there and scoring goals.”
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Eventually, Kane earned himself a trial at Spurs, but it was unsuccessful. He was poised to join Watford, until a hat-trick in a match against Tottenham persuaded them to change their mind. For a player to drop out of the academy system entirely for such a prolonged period and then return to elite level is highly unusual.
“Around that time, I went to do some coaching at Spurs,” says Buck. “When Harry left Arsenal, I never heard of him again. But then one of the scouts at Spurs said, ‘You worked with Harry Kane at Arsenal, didn’t you? We’ve just signed him’. I was really surprised, because when I’d seen him he was really, really struggling.”
Kane and Aneke would cross paths again. “Our secondary schools played each other one time,” says Aneke. “I would’ve been 15 or 16. I remember H scored from the halfway line. His ball-striking has always been elite level.”
Tottenham’s record goalscorer was also a late bloomer at international level. “He started playing for Spurs, and I was playing for Arsenal — but we played in the same England teams,” recalls Aneke. “I remember being with him for one England Under-18 squad. It was one of my last call-ups, but one of his first. It was like as I was finishing my England journey, he was just starting on his.
“I remember in one session, we did finishing practice. I was a midfielder that pushed forward so I joined in with the strikers. It was me, Saido Berahino, H and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. I remember their finishing was just unbelievable. I thought, ‘Wow, this is the standard now’.”
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Finally, there’s the thorny subject of who the young Kane supported. As an Arsenal academy player, he was granted occasional tickets to watch the Gunners at Highbury. “We always got tickets,” confirms Yennaris. “Two players would get tickets for every game, so we were always waiting for our turn on the rota to come around.”
For Kane, who returns to north London on Tuesday to take on Arsenal as Bayern Munich’s star striker, that held particular appeal — The Athletic has been told that, in his younger days, he was a dedicated Arsenal fan. We put this suggestion to the Kane family but did not receive a reply. There is, however, an infamous photograph of him in 2004, out in the streets of Highbury celebrating Arsenal’s Invincibles season with his hair dyed red and wearing the home shirt.
One of our own? The sensitivity around it is understandable. But it should also be understood that it is not uncommon for a young player to switch allegiance to a team they play for who offers them a lifeline.
“Football is about opportunities,” says Yennaris. “He got one at Spurs and he took it. I’m delighted for him and for his family. He’s a top guy.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)