Spurs chief wanted to sell Kane for £600k as he wasn’t ‘Champions League player’
Former Spurs boss Tim Sherwood has revealed Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy almost sold Harry Kane for a measly £600,000 to Leicester City back in 2013.
Since making his first team debut for Tottenham back in 2011, Kane has gone on to become one of the most prolific strikers the Premier League has ever seen, bagging a whopping 213 goals for the club.
However, there was a time when he was coming through the ranks at Tottenham that Levy and then technical director Franco Baldini were unsure of Kane’s quality and potential.
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Prior to being given regular first team minutes towards the back end of the 2013/14 campaign by Sherwood, the now legendary England forward had gone out on loan multiple times, starring for Leicester, Norwich, Millwall and Leyton Orient.
When he was eventually given his chance to shine in the Premier League under Sherwood, and then later Mauricio Pochettino, Kane took to the top flight like a duck to water, scoring 21 goals in 34 games in his breakthrough 2014/15 campaign.
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(Image: YouTube/Up Front With Simon Jordan)
(Image: Getty Images)
And speaking on William Hill’s Up Front with Simon Jordan podcast, Sherwood has revealed Levy and Baldini originally wanted to sell Kane to Leicester City due to him not being of Champions League quality.
Sherwood said: “As soon as I got inside Franco Baldini, the technical director, came over to me and said ‘the chairman wants to have a chat with you’.
“So we sit down in the office and Daniel Levy asks me ‘what’s the team tomorrow?’, and I talked him through it and as soon as I got to the end and said Harry Kane he instantly said ‘not Roberto Soldado or [Emmanuel] Adebayor?’
(Image: (Photo by Chloe Knott – Danehouse/Getty Images))
“He’d never asked me for the team before so he’s asking me because he’s got wind that Harry Kane is playing and he wanted to question me.
“He said that I was devaluing a player [Soldado] that they’d paid £29million for and I said to him ‘it never even crossed my mind that I was devaluing, I want to win the football match, do you?’
(Image: Getty Images)
”He proceeded to tell me that they didn’t think Kane was Premier League standard, and I said, ‘who thinks he’s not Premier League standard?’ and he said ‘Franco [Baldini].’
“Franco said ‘we’re looking for Champions League players and that I think we should let Harry move to somewhere else. He said ‘we’ve got a bid from Leicester, I think we can let him go there’, and I said ‘how much is it?’ – he said ‘£600,000’.
“I said, ‘he’s playing tomorrow, so we’ll see how he goes and take it from there’, and he came into the team and scored in his first three games and never looked back.
“If he [Levy] would have told me that I couldn’t play him I would have said ‘well you go and stand in the dugout tomorrow then’, and he knows I would have said it.”
