Miles Jacobson, the creator of the Football Manager computer game, has admitted that he and his team completely misjudged Harry Kane when he was first coming through at Tottenham Hotspur, leading to one of the biggest ratings boosts in the game’s history.
Kane is now a world-class striker, who has become the all-time top scorer for both Tottenham (GOAL) and the England national team. But he wasn’t always so prolific.
In his earlier playing days, Kane endured fairly underwhelming loan spells with Norwich, Millwall, and Leicester City.
It wasn’t until the 2013/14 season that Kane really started to find his form at Tottenham, and then of course, the rest is history.
Football Manager has become so much more than a game nowadays, with the database it holds being used as a legitimate scouting tool for many clubs around the world.
The game has an incredible knack for spotting the potential of future stars and allowing them to flourish as part of the in-game world.
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That wasn’t the case for Kane as a youngster, however, who was given a pretty poor rating in earlier versions of Football Manager. This led Jacobson to apologise to the Spurs star when he met him once.
He told What The Footie? Podcast: “Poor old Harry. I was at the London Football Awards, and I’ve known Harry’s agent for a while and he came over to me and said that Harry would like to say hello.
“My opening gambit was ‘I’m sorry our researchers didn’t think you’d become as good as you have done, so you had one of the biggest leaps in the history of the game in the last update.'”
Luckily, Kane wasn’t about to hold a grudge.
“He was understanding. He said that he didn’t blame me because he wasn’t great when he was on loan at Leicester,” Jacobson added.
“We don’t get it right every time, we didn’t get it right with Jamie Vardy too, but we did better with Harry Maguire when he was at Sheffield United and Andy Robertson.”
Spurs Web Opinion
While some players show immediately just how good they are, some players can evolve over time and surprise everybody.
I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how incredible Harry Kane would be, but it’s all a result of the player’s hard work over the years.
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