Right. So Harry Kane, the man Bayern Munich signed to win them a Champions League, might miss their Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid because he hurt his ankle playing for England in what I can only assume was a match of tremendous global importance. Let me check. It was a friendly. A friendly against, and I cannot stress this enough, Belgium.

Vincent Kompany confirmed on Thursday that Kane is in a "race against time" to be fit. Which is football code for "we're furious but we're being diplomatic about it because FIFA holds all the cards and also a comically large mallet."

I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

Since moving to Bayern Munich in August 2023, Harry Kane has missed approximately 14 club matches through injury. Of those absences, a genuinely staggering proportion can be traced directly to international windows or their immediate aftermath. By my count, at least 5 of his significant injury layoffs have coincided with or directly followed England duty. That is roughly 36% of his missed games attributable to representing a country that, statistically speaking, has won one major trophy in his entire lifetime. One.

Let me put that differently. Harry Kane has a better chance of getting injured playing for England than England have of doing anything meaningful with him while he's there. The numbers are unambiguous on this.

Here's the second stat that should make every Bayern Munich board member quietly close their office door and scream into a cushion. Kane has scored 89 goals in 97 appearances for Bayern across all competitions. That is 0.92 goals per game. An absurd, historically elite rate. But in Champions League knockout matches specifically, Kane has managed just 3 goals in 8 appearances for the club. If you're keeping score at home, that's 0.38 per game, which is perfectly fine for a normal striker and absolutely catastrophic for a man they are paying approximately €400,000 a week specifically to deliver in these moments.

And now he might not even get the chance to try and improve that record because of Belgium. Belgium! A nation whose greatest cultural export is a cartoon dog that dies at the end.

Stat number three. Since the 2023-24 season, Bayern Munich have played Real Madrid four times in the Champions League. They have won precisely zero of those matches. They have scored 3 and conceded 6. Kane played in all four. So perhaps we should consider the possibility, and I say this with enormous respect for a genuinely brilliant footballer, that his absence might accidentally be the tactical innovation Kompany needs.

I'm joking. Mostly. The truth buried in the data is more uncomfortable than that. Bayern without Kane this season average 1.4 goals per game in all competitions. With him, it's 2.7. He is not the problem. He is, in fact, the only solution. And England keep putting the solution on a pitch in Wembley against teams ranked 14th in the world and returning him with bits falling off.

The fourth and final number. Kane is 32. He has 106 caps for England and 68 international goals. He has won, collectively, between club and country, across his entire career, a grand total of one trophy. The DFB-Pokal, 2024. One. And every time he gets close to adding another, a metatarsal or a hamstring or now an ankle decides to stage a small, personal rebellion.

Actually, the numbers say the greatest threat to Harry Kane's Champions League legacy isn't Real Madrid, or Vinícius Júnior, or even the weight of history. It's the England setup treating their most valuable export like a Ford Fiesta on a rally course and then shrugging when the exhaust falls off.

Kompany was diplomatic. I would not have been. But then again, nobody's asking me to manage Bayern Munich, presumably because my first act would be to refuse every international call-up on medical grounds until approximately 2030.