It was inevitable at some point in the post-Kane world they now occupy that Spurs would have to buy an oven-ready first-team striker, and that was always going to be a pretty significant and interesting transfer.
But the identity of that striker and the fee they’ve paid make it doubly so. There is something undeniably neat about belatedly replacing Kane with a player who is currently a one-season wonder after scoring 19 goals in 38 Premier League games last season having managed just 10 in total before that.
And if it all does work out, Dominic Solanke could end up costing them north of £60m and a club-record fee.
It’s a fascinating transfer because in a lot of ways it makes a lot of sense. He’s in the best form of his career, clearly, is a player arriving at what should be something close to his peak for a club busy hoovering up prospects and potential elsewhere, and we know that even one year of regularly scoring Premier League goals drives up a price.
It could and should all work out splendidly. So why do we have this marked down and underlined three times in red pen as our flop of the season?
MORE ON SOLANKE TO SPURS
👉 Twenty biggest transfers in the world in 2024 summer transfer window
👉 Bayern’s Harry Kane gives verdict on £65m Tottenham Hotspur signing with two ‘great qualities’
Firstly, buying strikers is really hard. There’s an alchemic quality to goalscoring that appears particularly hard to predict. Unless you’re getting a Haaland or indeed a Kane there really are no guarantees even the most impressive track record will survive moving leagues or even clubs within one.
Second, there’s just plenty of reflex muscle memory here. Spurs are not alone in being historically sh*t at buying strikers, but they are a particularly striking case.
The last actual striker they signed who could be considered any kind of success is probably Fernando Llorente, and for all his mischief-making in that 2018/19 Champions League run he also scored precisely two Premier League goals in 36 games.
Before that, Emmanuel Adebayor maybe? Peter Crouch a bit? Before that you’re probably looking at re-signing Robbie Keane and Jermain Defoe, and that hardly counts really and neither were quite so good in their second spells in North London.
You could make a case that while Son Heung-min has never really been a pure No. 9 he is nevertheless the best and most effective one they’ve signed in very nearly 20 years. And even then they only signed him as a fall-back having failed to secure their top target in Saido Berahino.
For the last indisputable unqualified successful signing of an out-and-out striker by Spurs you’re going right back to Dimitar Berbatov in 2006.
Kane clearly has been a very significant factor in the more recent failure to secure a striker signing that works, but it’s also an issue that precedes his rise to prominence by a good decade.
It’s an awful lot of years and an awful lot of money on an awful lot of Mido and Darren Bent and Roman Pavlyuchenko and Roberto Soldado and Vincent Janssen and Carlos Vinicius and Richarlison.
So it’s easy to see why anyone might be a bit nervous about the club now dropping anything close to £60m on a 26-year-old who has scored two-thirds of his career top-flight goals in the last 12 months.
There’s an intoxicating fragility to it as a transfer. Solanke’s efforts last season in an enterprising Bournemouth team mean there is clearly a whole host of plausible scenarios in which this all goes splendidly and by September social media is awash with all manner of ‘HARRY WHO?’ whimsy. You can’t yet, at this stage, truly confidently write it off as a bad transfer.
But you’d also not be remotely surprised if Solanke’s first season at Spurs comes far closer to the six goals in 33 games he managed in 22/23 than the 19 in 38 from the last campaign.
Maybe Spurs have been clever in signing Kane’s replacement a year on from his departure, providing a kind of decompression chamber that allows his replacement to avoid the harshest and most direct comparison. For better or worse, this Spurs team is also now a markedly and defiantly different one to that which Kane left on the eve of last season.
They are one of the biggest and least predictable variables in a league where, City and Arsenal apart, the rest of what we’re now cautiously calling a Big Eight look almost impossible to pin down.
Before Solanke’s arrival it still felt entirely feasible for Spurs to finish pretty much anywhere between third and eighth this season without anyone really being all that surprised, but now which one it might be feels quite significantly tied to his own efforts.
And that all feels so hard to predict, especially with his signing coming at just the right point for him to feature in no pre-season games at all but to have long enough with his new team-mates that it’s reasonable to assume he goes straight in for Monday night’s trip to Leicester.
A striker who could score anywhere between five and 20 goals without surprising anyone at a team who could finish third or eighth without surprising anyone. It’s quite a combination.