Does Harry Kane need to leave Bayern Munich in order to win trophies?

There is now a very real opportunity for Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich and Harry Kane to combine and produce perhaps the funniest thing ever.

The mountains of glee that surround the idea – one that grows ever more feasible – of Harry Kane joining Bayern Munich and still not winning a trophy is really quite startling. It doesn’t particularly feel like it’s anything personal, just that it would represent an almost impossible high point of farce in what is already an almost unimprovable career of personal triumph and team heartache.

There have been very good players before who didn’t win much, but few anywhere near as good as Kane and none surely who have a CV quite so pointedly littered with personal milestones and accomplishments and – crucially – huge near-misses where the team trophies should be.

It’s not just that Kane doesn’t have any trophies (and we do mean any trophies, he’s never won anything as a senior professional). It’s not that he combines this with an enormous collection of individual gongs and trinkets; it’s that he does all that and comes so, so close.

Kane has won nothing but has been a runner-up in the Premier League, the Champions League, the European Championships and even the Carabao. He’s been a World Cup and FA Cup semi-finalist. It’s almost impossible to improve on how grimly funny that is.

And yet Kane may, incredibly, have found a way. He could have spent his entire career at Tottenham and won nothing. That would have been funny, but there would have been a sort of forlorn nobility to it. A kind of dignity.

Instead, he made the most overtly trophy-seeking move it was possible to make. More so even than Manchester City, joining Bayern Munich is the biggest sure thing in terms of winning trophies that can still be considered top level.

The Bundesliga title hasn’t been in anyone else’s hands since Jurgen Klopp’s Dortmund won a couple of back-to-back titles in 2011 and 2012 at the end of a weird little period in history where Wolfsburg and Stuttgart and Werder Bremen as well as Bayern all got their hands on the trophy in an eight-year period.

It’s now 11 straight titles and counting for Bayern, a run that simply has no near-equivalent among modern elite leagues where one might also be joining a club with a decent shot at the Champions League. There was, then, simply no other transfer Kane could have chosen that had so obvious a motive. Put that trophy drought to bed with the title equivalent of a penalty kick.

Sure, it would be treated the same way as all the penalties Kane has scored and people would pretend it didn’t really count, but they would be there on his Wikipedia page and nobody could take that away from him. Well, they could, but those pranksters would soon find their wiki editing privileges revoked.

READ: A step-by-step guide to show Harry Kane has actually scored precisely zero proper goals for England

Bayern have won over 40 trophies in the 21st century. If anything, Clive, that’s too many trophies, isn’t it? Impossible for the buzz to last, isn’t it? Must got boring. But it wouldn’t for Kane. It would still be novel for him.

When Kane made his move, the obvious potential for banter appeared to lie in his very first game. It was the German Super Cup and the likelihood was that he would win a trophy – tinpot, sure, but a trophy nonetheless – in his very first game after all those hundreds and hundreds of games without one at Spurs. But in an early foreshadowing of what might be to come, Bayern were humbled 3-0 by RB Leipzig.

It was only delaying the inevitable, of course, a trophy would be on its way soon enough. This is Bayern Munich. But since then they’ve also crashed out of the DFB Pokal 2-1 at third-tier Saarbrucken. They are still second favourites for the Champions League, but that’s not really what you want to be pinning your hopes on after making a move to win easy trophies, is it?

But even all this isn’t what makes it really funny. It would be funny if Bayern were seven points off the pace in the Bundesliga with Kane struggling to adapt to his new surroundings. Yet that’s not the case either. He’s flying. He may very well break the Bundesliga scoring record.

Just think of that. Kane going to Bayern Munich and simultaneously breaking all individual records while somehow snapping their title-winning streak would be the most on-brand thing any footballer has ever done.

You don’t need to feel any animosity towards Kane to find it irresistible. Especially because if he does end up without the Bundesliga title to show for a likely 40-plus individual goal haul it will be Granit Xhaka lifting the trophy.

Meanwhile, Thomas Tuchel’s response to the mounting fear that Kane might actually be cursed is a curious one: he’s seemingly trying to reassemble Tottenham’s 2019 Champions League matchday squad in Munich. As a former Chelsea manager he may be feeling that the role of Tottenham manager is his by right and is simply attempting to do it vicariously. If he succeeds in his quest to add Kieran Trippier to a squad already featuring Kane and Eric Dier, he will have more of that 2019 squad at his disposal than Ange Postecoglou; Heung-min Son and Ben Davies are the only survivors still at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

If they and their current team-mates can somehow wangle themselves the FA Cup this season while a ‘jealous’ Kane goes potless, we may as well declare the end of banter. What could possibly top it?