Harry Kane scored in both legs against Real Madrid. He has 51 goals in all competitions this season. He is 32 years old and playing the best football of his life. And yet somehow, when people talk about the greatest strikers of this generation, his name still does not come first. That needs to change. This is the case for Harry Kane being the most underrated elite striker in world football.

The Numbers Are Impossible to Ignore

Let us start with what Kane has done this season because the numbers are genuinely historic. Fifty-one goals in all competitions for Bayern Munich in 2025-26. That makes him the first player to reach fifty goals for a big-five European club in a single season since Erling Haaland scored fifty-two for Manchester City in 2022-23. He has scored thirty-two Bundesliga goals, ten of which came from the penalty spot. He has registered five assists. His average FotMob rating across Bundesliga matches this season is 8.25, making him the highest-rated striker in the league. He has won the Man of the Match award more times than any other player in the Bundesliga this season.

In the Champions League he has scored in both legs against Real Madrid, one of the most decorated clubs in European history. His goal at the Allianz Arena in the second leg, the header that made it 2-1 on the night, was the fiftieth Champions League goal of his career for club level, making him the highest-scoring English player in the history of the competition. He did all of this at thirty-two years old.

The combined goal contributions of Bayern’s front three this season, Kane, Michael Olise and Luis Diaz, are the most recorded by any attacking trio in the history of the Bundesliga since records began in 1988. Kane is the engine of that unit. He is having one of the great individual seasons in European football. And people are still not talking about him enough.

The Tottenham Problem

To understand why Kane is underrated you have to understand what happened to him at Tottenham. He spent fourteen years at a club that never won anything significant. Not a league title. Not a Champions League. Not a major domestic cup. He reached the Champions League final in 2019 and lost to Liverpool. He reached the Euro 2020 final with England and lost to Italy. He was League Cup runner-up twice. He collected runner-up medals the way other elite players collect trophies.

None of that was his fault. Kane scored over three hundred goals for Tottenham, won three Premier League Golden Boots, became only the second player in history to score two hundred Premier League goals. But because the team around him never delivered silverware, the narrative around his career was always framed as a story of near-misses and bad luck rather than extraordinary individual achievement.

Kane himself spoke about this honestly. He admitted that no matter how many goals he scored at Spurs, the individual awards and the recognition never quite arrived because trophies were always missing from the conversation. He never won the PFA Player of the Year award despite winning the Golden Boot three times. The system rewards winners and Kane spent over a decade being brilliant for a team that could not quite become one.

What Bayern Showed the World

When Kane left Tottenham for Bayern Munich in the summer of 2023, the football world watched to see whether his numbers were a product of playing in a weaker team where he was the dominant figure, or whether he was genuinely world class. The answer came within months and has not stopped coming since.

In his first Bundesliga season he scored thirty-six goals, won the Golden Boot and helped Bayern reclaim the league title. In his second season he has already surpassed fifty goals across all competitions with weeks still remaining. He is not just scoring. He is creating, pressing, holding up the ball, bringing teammates into play and leading a forward line that is producing historically unprecedented numbers.

Vincent Kompany, who manages Bayern, has spoken repeatedly about how Kane is not just a goalscorer but a complete footballer. His movement off the ball creates space for Olise and Diaz. His link-up play allows Bayern to build through him in ways that pure penalty box strikers cannot. He drops deep, plays combinations, switches the point of attack and then arrives in the box at exactly the right moment to score. It is a technical and tactical masterclass every single week.

The Comparison He Deserves

When people discuss the great strikers of this era the names that come up first are usually Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappe and Robert Lewandowski. All three are exceptional players. But the case for Kane belonging in that conversation is overwhelming.

Haaland is arguably the most clinical finisher in the history of the sport but his game is built almost entirely on goalscoring. Kane does everything Haaland does in front of goal and significantly more outside the penalty area. Mbappe offers more pace and dribbling but his numbers this season have not come close to Kane’s output. Lewandowski, who Kane is most often compared to, is a wonderful player but at thirty-seven years old is in the final phase of his career while Kane is producing historic numbers at thirty-two.

The argument is not that Kane is better than all of them. The argument is that he belongs in the same sentence as all of them and for most of his career he has not been placed there. That gap between what he has produced statistically and the level of recognition he has received is the definition of being underrated.

The World Cup and What Comes Next

This summer Kane will captain England at the 2026 World Cup on home soil across North America. England are in Group I alongside France, Senegal and Norway. Kane arrives at the tournament as England’s all-time top scorer and in the best form of his career. The World Cup represents his last realistic chance at the one prize that has eluded him throughout everything else.

He has already won the Bundesliga with Bayern. He has already broken records that seemed untouchable. He has already proved beyond any reasonable doubt that his career at Tottenham was the story of an elite player trapped in a team that could not match his level. The recognition has been slow to arrive but it is arriving now.

After two legs against Real Madrid, after fifty goals in a single season, after a Champions League semi-final with Bayern against PSG still to come, the conversation is finally catching up with the reality. Harry Kane is one of the best strikers who has ever played the game. It just took longer than it should have for the world to say it out loud.

1. Mallorca 2-1 Real Madrid: The Result That Changed LaLiga

Ninety minutes. That is all it took for LaLiga’s title race to effectively end. Real Madrid, chasing Barcelona at the top, travelled to Mallorca needing a routine win against a side sitting in the relegation zone. What they got was a stoppage time sucker punch that will define their season.

Madrid should have won comfortably. Kylian Mbappe had multiple chances saved by goalkeeper Leo Roman, who produced one of the performances of his career. Madrid thought they had salvaged a point when Eder Militao powered home a header in the 88th minute. Then Vedat Muriqi happened. The Kosovo striker, fighting back tears after his country’s World Cup qualification dreams had ended during the international break, converted a swift counter-attack in stoppage time to send Son Moix into chaos.

The result left Madrid seven points behind Barcelona with eight games remaining. With Barcelona winning later that same day, the gap is now almost certainly too large to close. For a club of Real Madrid’s stature, losing to a relegation side days before a Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich is a damaging blow. The pressure on manager Alvaro Arbeloa has never been greater.

2. Atletico Madrid 1-2 Barcelona: Lewandowski Wins It Late

While Madrid were capitulating on the island, Barcelona were doing what title-winning teams do. They ground out a result at one of the hardest grounds in Spain, against a red-hot Atletico side, with a late winner, after a man had been sent off, after a controversial VAR decision went against the home team. Welcome to the title run-in.

Atletico drew first blood through Giuliano Simeone, but Barcelona equalised quickly through Marcus Rashford, who has found his form at exactly the right moment of the season. The real turning point came in first-half stoppage time when Nicolas Gonzalez was shown a red card for fouling Lamine Yamal, reducing Atletico to ten men for the entire second half.

Barcelona pushed and pushed. Musso in the Atletico goal made save after save. Then in the 87th minute Robert Lewandowski was in the right place at the right time when Joao Cancelo’s shot cannoned back off the keeper, bundling the ball home to win it. Barcelona are now seven points clear at the top with eight games remaining. The title is almost certainly theirs. The fact that both sides now face each other again in the Champions League quarter-final makes this result even more significant psychologically.

3. Freiburg 2-3 Bayern Munich: The Best Comeback of the Weekend

If Real Madrid’s result was the most consequential of the weekend, Bayern Munich’s was the most dramatic. With the Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid arriving on Tuesday, Bayern needed a morale boost. They got one in the most extraordinary fashion possible.

Freiburg led 2-0 with ten minutes remaining. Bayern had barely threatened. Then everything changed. Three goals in the final stages, a comeback that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with desire, sent Bayern into the dressing room with the kind of belief that terrifies opponents. Lennart Karl scored the winner in the dying minutes as Bayern came from two down to win 3-2 in one of the more remarkable Bundesliga finishes of the season.

Bayern midfielder Joshua Kimmich said of striker Harry Kane, who missed the game with an ankle injury, that he would play for Bayern in a wheelchair. The mood in the camp heading into Tuesday’s first leg at the Bernabeu is electric. Real Madrid, seven points behind in their own league and on the back of a loss to a relegation side, have work to do.

4. Manchester City 4-0 Liverpool: Haaland Back With a Vengeance

There are performances that remind you why certain players are talked about the way they are. Erling Haaland’s display against Liverpool in the FA Cup quarter-final was one of them. A hat-trick in eighteen minutes, his 12th treble for Manchester City since joining in 2022, as City demolished Liverpool 4-0 at the Etihad to reach a record eighth consecutive FA Cup semi-final.

The goals were typical Haaland: a penalty dispatched low and hard, a perfectly timed header from a Semenyo cross, and a finish off the underside of the bar from an O’Reilly cutback. Rayan Cherki and Antoine Semenyo were exceptional around him, the former Liverpool assistant coach Pep Lijnders watching from the dugout as Guardiola served a touchline ban.

For Liverpool the afternoon was a horror show. Mohamed Salah, playing his first match since announcing he will leave at the end of the season, missed four clear chances including a penalty saved by James Trafford. The pressure on manager Arne Slot is now immense, with a Champions League quarter-final trip to Paris Saint-Germain coming on Wednesday. Liverpool, champions twelve months ago, are fifth in the Premier League and fading fast.

5. Southampton 2-1 Arsenal: The Shock Nobody Saw Coming

If Mallorca beating Real Madrid was the result of the day in LaLiga, Southampton eliminating Arsenal from the FA Cup was its equivalent in England. A Championship side, sitting seventh in the second division, knocked out the Premier League leaders with a 2-1 win that nobody predicted and Arsenal will take a long time to forget.

Arsenal had won the League Cup final against Manchester City just weeks earlier and arrived at Southampton as overwhelming favourites. They left without a trophy chance and with a serious injury concern after Brazil centre-back Gabriel Magalhaes was forced off with a knee problem midway through the second half. The loss to Southampton is their second cup exit at the hands of lower league opposition this season.

To their credit, Arsenal still lead the Premier League by nine points and remain strong favourites to win the title. But losing the FA Cup this way, conceding a winner in the 85th minute, will sting. Manager Mikel Arteta described it as their first real moment of difficulty this season. His Champions League quarter-final against Sporting Lisbon now looms even larger as their last chance at a trophy double.

6. Hammarby 3-0 Mjallby: Allsvenskan is Back and Already Delivering

Away from the glamour of the Champions League build-up and the FA Cup drama, Swedish football returned this weekend and did so in style. Hammarby hosted Mjallby on the opening day of the 2026 Allsvenskan season in front of 30,000 fans in Stockholm, and the defending champions were taken apart completely.

Paulos Abraham scored a hat-trick as Hammarby delivered a statement performance against Mjallby, who had broken the Swedish points record to win the title last season. Abraham opened the scoring in the 42nd minute and did not stop there, completing his treble to send a packed and passionate home crowd into raptures. Mjallby, under a new manager after their record-breaking campaign, looked a shadow of the team that dominated Sweden last year.

The Allsvenskan is one of European football’s most underrated leagues for atmosphere and entertainment, and if this opening day is anything to go by, 2026 promises to deliver. Hammarby are the early title favourites after this, while Mjallby face an immediate question about whether their remarkable 2025 was a peak they simply cannot sustain.

What Does It All Mean?

The weekend shaped the rest of the season across multiple competitions simultaneously. Barcelona are running away with LaLiga. Bayern Munich head to Madrid on the back of a comeback win that has boosted their belief enormously. Manchester City are genuine FA Cup favourites after dismantling the Premier League champions. And Liverpool, Arsenal and Real Madrid all enter the biggest week of the club calendar with damage to repair and questions to answer.

The Champions League quarter-finals begin on Tuesday. Real Madrid host Bayern Munich. Barcelona host Atletico Madrid. Arsenal travel to Sporting Lisbon. Liverpool go to Paris. After a weekend like this one, it is impossible to predict anything. Which is exactly why we watch.

The Reasoning Behind Each Pick

Real Madrid are in excellent domestic form heading into this weekend, having won eleven of their last thirteen LaLiga matches. Mallorca sit in the relegation zone with just one win in their last five and have not beaten any team in the top seven all season. With Mbappe and Vinicius both expected to start, Madrid should have too much quality for a struggling home side.

The Freiburg versus Bayern both teams to score tip is backed by a strong statistical trend. Both sides have found the net in six of their last seven meetings and Freiburg have scored in twelve of thirteen home league games this season. Bayern will almost certainly rotate some players with their Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid arriving next week, which could leave gaps defensively. Freiburg are dangerous at home and Igor Matanovic has been in fine form.

Atletico Madrid versus Barcelona has consistently delivered goals this season. Their recent head-to-head meetings have averaged 3.6 goals per game and both clubs arrive in strong attacking form. The added motivation of a Champions League quarter-final between them later this week means neither side will hold anything back. Over 2.5 goals feels like a well-supported call.

The Bayern over 1.5 goals tip stands on its own merits even with Harry Kane potentially missing due to the ankle injury he picked up on England duty. Bayern have scored two or more goals in 33 of their last 35 Bundesliga fixtures. Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Jamal Musiala provide more than enough quality to cover for any absences against a Freiburg side that has conceded in nine consecutive matches across all competitions.

Lazio at home against Parma rounds off the slip. Lazio are a solid home side and Parma have had a difficult season on the road, carrying one of the poorer away records in Serie A. This is a straightforward home win backed by form rather than any major tactical angle.

Good luck to anyone following along. Check back tomorrow for our full UCL quarter-finals preview covering all four first legs starting Tuesday.

From Pulheim to the Bundesliga: The Early Years

Florian Richard Wirtz was born on 3 May 2003 in Pulheim, a small town just outside Cologne in western Germany. He grew up less than 20 kilometres from Bayer Leverkusen’s stadium, though his early football education took place at 1. FC Koln, the city’s biggest club, where he spent almost a decade in the youth system and won a U17 Bundesliga title in 2019. In January 2020, Leverkusen made their move, and within months the football world began to take notice.

On 18 May 2020, just a fortnight after his 17th birthday, Wirtz made his senior Bundesliga debut against Werder Bremen, becoming Leverkusen’s youngest-ever first-team player at 17 years and 15 days. It did not take long for him to go one step further. On 6 June 2020, he scored against Bayern Munich, making him the youngest goalscorer in Bundesliga history at 17 years and 34 days. That record has since been broken by Youssoufa Moukoko, but the moment set the tone for what was to follow. Here was a teenager who did not just belong at senior level: he thrived on it.

The records kept coming. He became the first player under 18 to reach five Bundesliga goals. He became the first player under 19 to reach ten. At 18 years and 223 days, he made his 50th Bundesliga appearance, becoming the youngest player to reach that milestone in the competition’s history. By any measure, this was not a normal talent.

The Injury That Could Have Ended Everything

On 13 March 2022, in a Bundesliga match against Koln of all clubs, Wirtz tore his anterior cruciate ligament. He was 18 years old, playing the best football of his young life, and suddenly he was facing the most serious injury a footballer can suffer. For many players, an ACL tear at that age changes them: the pace slows, the confidence wavers, the explosiveness never quite returns. For Wirtz, almost the opposite happened.

He missed the rest of the 2021/22 season and spent ten months in rehabilitation, returning to competitive action in January 2023. Those who watched him closely in the months after his comeback noticed something different about him. He was more deliberate, more composed, more complete. The raw brilliance was still there, but it was now wrapped in maturity and decision-making that players twice his age would envy. Leverkusen coach Xabi Alonso, who arrived at the club in October 2022, recognised immediately what he had. The rebuild had produced something better than what existed before.

The Invincible Season: Leverkusen 2023/24

The 2023/24 Bundesliga season belongs in the history books regardless of who you support. Bayer Leverkusen went the entire domestic campaign unbeaten, winning the Bundesliga title for the first time in the club’s history and completing a domestic double by adding the DFB-Pokal. They also reached the final of the UEFA Europa League, where they were beaten by Atalanta. At the centre of almost everything was Wirtz.

Across 32 Bundesliga appearances that season, he scored 11 goals and provided 11 assists, reaching double figures for both metrics for the first time in his career. His 22 goal contributions across the league campaign placed him among the best creators in Europe. He scored the title-clinching hat-trick as a second-half substitute in a 5-0 win over Werder Bremen in April 2024, a moment that captured everything about him: the composure, the timing, the ability to produce the defining moment when it mattered most. Xabi Alonso put it simply: “Flo is a good player even at 70 percent.” That year’s Bundesliga Players’ Player of the Season award was never in doubt.

It is worth pausing on one specific number from that season. Wirtz made 875 intensive runs in just ten appearances during one stretch of the campaign, more than any other player in the Bundesliga. He also attempted more take-ons than any other player in the league in 2024/25, completing 56 percent of them successfully. These are not the numbers of a luxury player who drifts in and out of games. They are the numbers of someone who works as hard as he creates.

The Transfer: Why Liverpool Won the Race

By the summer of 2025, it was clear that Wirtz was leaving Leverkusen. The question was where. Bayern Munich wanted him. Manchester City wanted him. Both clubs are bigger in terms of recent trophies and global stature than Liverpool were at that moment. Wirtz chose Liverpool anyway, and the reason matters.

Arne Slot had a specific idea for how Wirtz would fit into his Liverpool side, and he communicated that directly and convincingly. Wirtz, by all accounts, was drawn to the clarity of the plan and the identity of the club. Liverpool paid a British record initial fee of £100 million, with performance-based add-ons potentially taking the total to £116.5 million, surpassing the £115 million Chelsea paid for Moises Caicedo as the most expensive transfer in British football history. He signed a contract until June 2030 and was handed the number seven shirt, a number with significant history at Anfield.

He made his debut in the FA Community Shield against Crystal Palace on 10 August 2025, contributing an assist in a 2-2 draw. His first Premier League appearance followed five days later in a 4-2 win over Bournemouth. The transition from the Bundesliga to English football is one of the most demanding in the game: higher pace, less space, more physical duels across a longer season. Wirtz, like all new arrivals, needed time to adjust.

His First Season at Liverpool: The Numbers Tell a Nuanced Story

Across the 2025/26 Premier League season so far, Wirtz has recorded 4 goals and 2 assists in 2,015 minutes of league football, with an average FotMob rating of 7.19. Those raw numbers look modest relative to his Leverkusen output, and some observers have used them to suggest he has struggled with the transition. The reality is more interesting than that.

Context matters enormously here. In his final season at Leverkusen, Wirtz had 13 assists in all competitions across a full campaign. At Liverpool, he is operating within a different system, around different players, against different defences, and in a league that gives attacking midfielders considerably less time on the ball than the Bundesliga. His positional awareness rating of 4th in the Premier League and his attacking threat ranking of 4th in the competition tell a different story to the basic goal tally: this is a player who is creating danger, making the right runs, and influencing games in ways that do not always show up in the final statistics. He ranked 11th in the entire Premier League for expected threat, measuring how much danger he generates from midfield positions.

His most recent form has also been pointing sharply upward. He provided an assist in Liverpool’s 4-0 win over Galatasaray in the Champions League round of 16 on 18 March, the tie that sent Liverpool into the quarter-finals. Days later, playing for Germany against Switzerland in a pre-tournament friendly, he scored twice and assisted twice in a 4-3 win, earning a 9.7 FotMob rating. When the stage gets bigger, Wirtz tends to rise to meet it.

What Kind of Player Is He, Exactly?

Wirtz is listed as an attacking midfielder but that description does not fully capture what he does. He can play centrally as a number ten, wide left as an inverted winger, or as a false nine. Xabi Alonso used him in all three roles at Leverkusen. His strengths according to WhoScored data are holding the ball, passing, through balls, dribbling and key passes, all rated as strong. His weaknesses are aerial duels and crossing, which is entirely consistent with his profile as a low-centre-of-gravity, technical player who wins games on the ground.

What separates him from other technically gifted midfielders is the combination of work rate and intelligence. He drifts into half-spaces constantly, arriving late into the penalty area to finish moves rather than simply playing the final pass. He covers enormous distances per game and makes intensive runs that most creative players would consider unnecessary. Freiburg coach Christian Streich, after watching Wirtz destroy his side in the 2023/24 season, said: “You can’t defend against Florian Wirtz.” That is not a throwaway comment from a defeated manager. It is an accurate description of a player whose movement makes him almost impossible to mark.

The PSG Tie and What It Means for His Liverpool Story

On 8 April, Wirtz will walk out at the Parc des Princes for Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final first leg against PSG. It will be one of the biggest matches of his career so far: the reigning European champions, the most hostile atmosphere in French football, and a tie with a clear revenge subplot for Liverpool after last season’s penalty shootout exit. For Wirtz specifically, it is also a chance to make a definitive statement about his place in this Liverpool side.

PSG’s midfield, built around Vitinha and Warren Zaire-Emery, will attempt to cut the supply lines between Liverpool’s defence and their attacking players. How Wirtz operates between the lines, how quickly he releases the ball under pressure, and whether he can find the pockets of space that PSG’s high defensive line will inevitably leave, could define the tie. In his best form, he is exactly the type of player who makes a PSG defensive block look porous. Liverpool will need that version of him in Paris.

He turned 22 in May 2025. He has already been the youngest scorer in Bundesliga history, survived an ACL tear, won a Bundesliga title with an unbeaten side, been voted the league’s best player twice, broken the British transfer record, and reached a Champions League quarter-final in his first season in England. Whatever happens against PSG, the story of Florian Wirtz is nowhere near its best chapter yet.