The feeling may be naggingly familiar. Harry Kane’s team are out of the cup, off the pace in the league, and look like they may need a strong European campaign to rescue anything from their season.

The problem is that it was not meant to be like this when Kane left Tottenham Hotspur for Bayern Munich last summer. This was meant to be the start of the rest of his career, the moment when he left an aspirational team for a dominant one.

Bayern had won the last 11 straight Bundesliga titles and everyone expected them to add a 12th, especially now with Kane leading the line. In those 11 years, they have won five German cups, as well as the Champions League in 2013 and 2020, losing the final in 2012 and reaching four other semi-finals.

But right now, Bayern are wondering what happened to their early-season optimism. The early cup exit to FC Saarbrucken could be written off as a one-off as long as they performed in the big competitions. But they have been desperately sloppy in the league, losing their third game of the season 3-0 to Bayer Leverkusen on Saturday. Tuchel’s team are now five points behind the leaders with 13 games left.

GO DEEPER

Blunt and beaten – Tuchel’s Bayern Munich look lost

Of course, there is still plenty of time for Bayern to turn it around. Remember that, last year, they needed a Jamal Musiala winner in the final minute of the season against Cologne to beat Borussia Dortmund to the title. But right now they simply do not look like they are playing well enough to go on the sort of run required to snatch the title from Leverkusen.

Which leads us to Wednesday night’s game in Rome. Bayern are certainly favourites to make it through to the quarter-finals — a stage Lazio have not reached since 2000 back when Sven-Goran Eriksson was their manager. Elimination for Bayern would be a disaster and would surely make it impossible for Tuchel to continue. But they will need to get close to the final at Wembley — where they won the Champions League in 2013 — for this season to be a success. And while they have the forward line to trouble anyone, on current form they probably would not want to get drawn against Manchester City or Real Madrid any time soon.

Pressure on Bayern, then, but pressure on Kane too. He has been exceptional since his big move last summer, with 24 goals in 21 Bundesliga appearances and another four in his six Champions League group games. But Kane will know as well as anyone that he was not bought simply to score hat-tricks in an 8-0 home win over Darmstadt or a 7-0 home win over Bochum. Or even in a 4-0 away win at Dortmund.

Kane after scoring a hat-trick against Dortmund in November (S. Mellar/FC Bayern via Getty Images)

Kane was bought to help Bayern win the big games in the second half of the season: the games where big players truly cement their legacies. And in the first really big game of the season, at Leverkusen on Saturday, Kane was unable to make an impact. He managed only 18 touches, didn’t have a shot and didn’t create a chance as he was shut out of the game by Xabi Alonso’s side.

He was by no means the only Bayern player to underperform, and the whole club is now in a mood of introspection following the defeat. But when a club spends €100million ($126m) on a 30-year-old striker, they expect him to be able to win them big games precisely when nobody else is playing well.

Given Bayern’s recent struggles, it is impossible not to think back to what Kane said in September, that there was a “different pressure” at Bayern than at Tottenham. Because it “wasn’t a disaster” when Tottenham went a few games without winning, whereas at Bayern “the feeling is that you have to win every game”. We can infer from this how everyone at Bayern will be feeling right now, and how much pressure there is on their European campaign.

But you could still argue that Kane needs a strong end to the season just as much as Bayern do.

Everyone is more than familiar with the tired debate about whether Kane needs to win trophies to be deemed a truly great player. He was a great player when he did not win anything playing for Spurs and will remain a great player even if he wins nothing this season with Bayern. One of the most valuable things that a trophy would give him, beyond personal pride, would be to end the debate. In an instant, he could shed himself of the tag of the greatest player in the history of the game never to win anything, the man who achieved everything in football, except for the most fundamental achievement of all.

But there is another aspect to Kane’s legacy here, one that he can solve in the next few months whether he ends the season with a trophy or not. Kane’s career is defined by supreme accumulation. More goals than anyone else for Tottenham. More goals than anyone else for England. One World Cup Golden Boot. Three Premier League Golden Boots. He is on 386 senior goals for club and country. You could easily see him pushing beyond 500 to 600 or beyond. (For context, Gary Lineker retired with 331 senior goals for club and country, Wayne Rooney with 366 and Alan Shearer with 409.)

Kane is not just a great goalscorer but a scorer of great goals too. He has achieved remarkable technical mastery, working tirelessly throughout his career to improve every single aspect of his game. His finishing is a marvel, not just for its reliability but also for its range, and an innovative capacity he is rarely given credit for. He has also transformed himself as a player over the years, from a physically dominant No 9 in his early twenties to one of football’s best creators as he got older. By the end of his time at Spurs, he was a false nine in the classical sense, dropping short, creating space behind him, and picking the pass through.

Kane after Spurs lost the 2019 Champions League final (Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)

But for all of this, there is still a lingering sense that his career is lacking in what you might call ‘legacy moments’, goals that will be remembered by everyone because they counted for so much. Ask neutrals of his most significant goal for Spurs and most will draw a blank. His whip from the left-hand side in the north London derby at the old White Hart Lane in March 2016 felt like it was of world-historical significance at the time. But that game finished 2-2 and Spurs came third in the league. There was his headed winner against Arsenal the previous season, his goal in the 2017 FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea, his winner against Manchester City in February 2022 — but none of those moments ultimately led to a trophy.

In the very biggest games for Spurs, that career-defining moment never came. He was effectively shut out of the 2015 League Cup final. He was physically dominated by Virgil van Dijk in the 2019 Champions League final after two months out injured. And he did not look at his best for the 2021 League Cup final, again coming straight back into the team after an ankle injury. And for the decisive wins in the run to the 2019 final, against Manchester City and Ajax, Kane was out injured. The legacy moments belonged to Fernando Llorente and Lucas Moura instead.

Even for England, for whom Kane has a brilliant tournament record, he looked exhausted in the 2018 World Cup semi against Croatia, faded in the Euro 2020 final against Italy, and then missed the penalty against France in the quarter-final in 2022. It would be unfair to view his England career through this prism given how reliable he has been but, inevitably, some critics will.

So it certainly feels as if Kane has some unfinished business with the Champions League. He was desperate to get back to this competition, and to play for a team who could make an impression on it. Not many people remember it now, but Spurs were in fact in the Champions League last season, limping out after losing 1-0 on aggregate to AC Milan in the last 16, the same stage Bayern are at now. When Spurs faced RB Leipzig in the last 16 in the 2019-20 season, Kane was out with a hamstring injury.

So, for the last time when Kane scored a Champions League knockout goal, you have to go back five years to one of his most underrated moments for Tottenham: his winner in a 1-0 second-leg win at Dortmund, confirming Spurs’ passage through to the quarter-finals. That campaign, of course, ended in the final. Kane will be desperately hoping to get back there on June 1. His fourth Wembley final. And this time with a different result.

(Mika Volkmann/Getty Images)