"If you want him, go get him." That's Dion Dublin's message to Manchester United on Harry Kane — and it's hard to argue with the logic when the man has scored 152 goals in 154 games for Bayern Munich.
Dublin, speaking to BetVictor, isn't bothered by Kane's age. The England captain turns 34 later this year, but he just put six past four different international opponents in a fortnight. That kind of production doesn't switch off overnight.
The case is simple: there's nobody else
"Who can you guarantee for goals?" Dublin asked. "Haaland, Kane, Lewandowski, Mbappe — and then you start to struggle." He's right. The list of strikers who reliably deliver 20-plus goals a season is extremely short. Kane has lived on it for the better part of a decade.
United's current options up front don't come close to that standard. Benjamin Sesko, signed for £74m, has shown promise under Michael Carrick but injury concerns are already mounting. Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo, and Marcus Rashford have all been used as makeshift centre-forwards. None of them is a natural number nine at this level. That gap in the squad is real, and it shows up in the standings.
Dublin's pitch for Kane goes beyond the goals, too. At 33, Kane has started drifting into deeper roles — dropping to the ten, occasionally further — which makes him harder to track. "Two centre-halves don't know where he is, and then he crops up," Dublin noted. For a United side that has often struggled to unlock defences, that kind of intelligent movement is exactly what's been missing.
United's complicated history with ageing stars
There's an obvious counterargument, and United's own history makes it. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Edinson Cavani, Cristiano Ronaldo's second stint — the club has a pattern of signing generational names on the back nine of their careers and watching it curdle. Ibrahimovic at least had one prolific season before heading to MLS. The other two were messier.
Kane is different in one specific way: he isn't in decline. His numbers with Bayern haven't dropped. His international form hasn't dropped. Whoever eventually signs him will be getting a fully functioning striker, not a legacy purchase.
The Bayern situation makes a January move plausible. Kane is in the final year of his contract — expiring July 2027 — and while the Bavarians are in talks to extend, they may also weigh up selling now and recovering close to the £100m they spent in 2023. Kane himself has a clear incentive: a return to the Premier League reopens his pursuit of Alan Shearer's all-time goals record.
At around £80m, the fee is steep for a player in his mid-thirties. But Dublin's fundamental point stands — there are four or five strikers on the planet who guarantee goals at the highest level, and United can actually afford one of them. That's not a position most clubs are in.
"United have toyed with it, they've spoken about it too much," Dublin said. After years of links and no action, that's the most accurate summary of the situation there is.
