Kane on proving critics wrong his whole career as record cap and Ballon d'Or define his peak

Harry Kane will become England’s most-capped outfield player when he leads the Three Lions out for their 126th time against Croatia at Wembley on Thursday, a milestone that arrives on the heels of the Bayern Munich striker winning the Ballon d’Or.

The 33-year-old used his pre-match media appearance to trace the arc of a career built on defying doubt — from being rejected by Arsenal as an eight-year-old, through difficult loan spells at Norwich and Leicester, to the nerves of his first England call-up. “I think it’s just my mindset, because I’ve maybe had to prove people wrong my whole career,” Kane said. “From early academy days proving coaches wrong, proving scouts wrong — it has just been instilled in me. I think if someone tells me I can’t do something it just motivates me more to do it.”

Kane was candid about the low points that shaped him. The loan moves to Norwich and Leicester, he said, were the toughest stretch of his early career, yet he credits them with building the resilience that carried him through later setbacks. Chief among those was the missed penalty against France in the quarter-finals of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. “Missing the penalty was a really tough moment for me,” he recalled, “but again the way I bounced back — and even the fact that I scored the next 30 penalties of my career. I changed the technique a little bit. It made me improve.”

He also remembered the anxiety of his first England camp and the steadying influence of then-captain Wayne Rooney. “I felt nervous coming into my first England camp. I remember Wayne being the first one to talk to me. He told me to just be myself and it’s kind of relaxed here with the team. But I was always confident once I got on the pitch. I felt this is my comfort zone — I know what I can do, I can score goals.”

Despite reaching the summit of the game with the Ballon d’Or, Kane insisted the hunger has not dimmed. “In football, you’ve never completed it, really. No matter what you’ve achieved, there is always a trophy that someone else has won or a goal record that someone else has. There’s always something. But it just helps motivate me to realise there’s a lot more to achieve.”

When asked whether he had ever had any “diva moments”, Kane smiled and suggested that might be a question better put to his wife, Kate — a rare flash of self-deprecating humour from a player whose public image has been defined almost entirely by professionalism and consistency.