Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.
“Where do you want it?”
Remember in The French Connection when detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) poses that question to a trusted informant—then maims him so it looks like the guy didn’t willingly rat?
Fans of the English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur inherited that role this past weekend when the Premier League club, located in north London, transferred their all-time leading goal scorer, Harry Kane, to top-flight German club Bayern Munich, minutes before the start of the 2023-24 season.
As a “Spurs” supporter on this side of the pond, it was a gut punch that recalled June 15, 1977, when baseball’s New York Mets traded the most famous player in their history, Tom Seaver, to the Cincinnati Reds. It took years to heal that emotional gash.
Fans of the Chicago Cubs can empathize. Less than five years after rewarding their long-suffering supporters by winning the 2016 World Series—their first such championship since 1908—the Cubs traded away three of that squad’s mainstays, first baseman Anthony Rizzo, shortstop Javier Báez, and third baseman Kris Bryant, within 24 hours. After this season, the Los Angeles Angels will be agonizing whether to retain free agent Shohei Ohtani, the home-run-hitting pitcher who excels in both roles as has no one in the game’s long history.
This player volatility isn’t unique to baseball. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers traded the best quarterback in their history, Aaron Rodgers, to the New York Jets after last season. In 1988, the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers traded the greatest hockey player ever, Wayne Gretzky, to the Los Angeles Kings.
But the NFL and NHL control movement far more than major league baseball and the NBA, which allow unrestricted free agency after a player’s contract expires. (The other leagues restrict movement by requiring the player’s intended team to compensate the current team with cash or draft choices or both.)
Mostly, though, U.S. pro players move at the whim of the teams they play for. MLB and NBA players can veto trades provided they’ve played a certain number of years in the league and consecutively with the same club (ten and five in MLB, eight and four in the NBA). And since the early days of pro sports, players can negotiate to insert no-trade clauses into their contracts. Babe Ruth had one back in 1920.
Players want to move for a variety of reasons; usually, it’s money, but sometimes it’s more. Seaver demanded that the Mets trade him because he couldn’t stomach management browbeating his wife, Nancy, during contract renegotiations. Kane left, he said, because he wanted to win championships, which Tottenham hasn’t accomplished since capturing the second-tier League Cup trophy in 2008, five seasons before Kane joined Spurs to stay. Their previous title was the English FA Cup in 1991, and they haven’t won the regular-season league title since 1961. As early as the 2021 season, Kane had told Tottenham management he didn’t want to remain.
In international soccer, players aren’t “traded”—they are transferred, and all parties, including the player, the current and prospective clubs, and the player’s agent, must agree to the move. If the player remains under contract, the new club essentially buys out the contract, paying that sum to the transferring club. Then, everyone hashes out a contract with the new club.
Considering Kane wanted out in the worst way, Spurs had little choice. They didn’t want to keep a disgruntled icon to affect team morale. Nor did they fancy losing him with nothing to show for it. So, they did the only thing they could: take the reported $126 million from Bayern and wish Kane auf wiedersehen.
In a tweet Saturday, Kane wrote: “Hard to put into words how to say goodbye to a club and fans who have done so much for me in my career. You will always be in my heart. Thank you Tottenham, thank you Tottenham fans.” Small consolation to those who supported him for so long, serenading him from their overpriced balcony seats, “Harry Kane, he’s one of our own.”
Call Kane disloyal? That concept has become complicated, especially in the workplace. Younger employees average less than a fifth of time at their jobs than older employees. No wonder, when too many companies consider employees commodities, jettisoned at will to maximize profit and return on investment. As my dear departed former newspaper colleague Skip Tanner once advised me, “Don’t love a company because it won’t love you back.” Lest we forget, professional sports are companies.
Should loyalty in sports count anymore? Great players of the past, such as Ernie Banks, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson, had no say about for whom they would be playing. Robinson, in fact, retired from baseball rather than accept a trade from the Brooklyn Dodgers, the team that signed him as the first black player in the majors, to the arch-rival New York Giants after the 1956 season.
Had free agency been an option, would those players have opted to remain with their clubs? It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t. Banks’ Cubs and Williams’ Boston Red Sox rarely contended during their careers. But the two were as part of their communities as the “T” is to Boston and the “L” to Chicago. Ron Santo refused a trade from the Cubs to the California (now Los Angeles) Angels and persuaded them to deal him to the White Sox so he could end his career in his beloved Chicago.
Harry Kane’s departure to a team in the country that once bombed London is the latest and starkest reminder of what Jerry Seinfeld once put it with wry humor: “Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify, because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.”
Do we blame Harry Kane for wanting to win something, anything, before he retires? Do we blame Spurs, which didn’t put a winner on the field over all those years? And do we blame ourselves for continuing, in the face of ongoing snubs at our loyalty, to buy the clothes . . . and the other merch, and especially the tickets? For getting ever closer to morphing into that French Connection informant? Where do we want it?
Top photo of Harry Kane during a match against Bayern Munich in 2019 is by MDI, available via Shutterstock.