Tottenham Hotspur's top 5 academy graduates

#1 Harry Kane

Harry Kane has scored an incredible 181 goals for Tottenham

Of all of Tottenham’s academy graduates, none have had the same impact at the club as star striker Harry Kane. It’s almost hard to believe today that after a series of failed loan moves in his early career at the club, it was looking likely at one point that he would never actually make it at the top level at all.

Kane signed with Spurs as an 11-year-old, and although his physical skills had not yet developed, he was marked out in those early days for his tremendous work ethic – something he’s kept with him throughout his subsequent career.

The striker signed his first professional contract in the summer of 2010 as a 17-year-old, and then embarked on a series of largely fruitless loan moves, playing three seasons away from Tottenham at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich and Leicester.

The fact that over those three seasons, Kane only scored 14 goals is now scarcely believable. He returned to Spurs at the start of the 2013-14 season, and was eventually given his chance in the first team by then-manager Tim Sherwood, scoring his first 3 Premier League goals in the process. It was in the next season – under Mauricio Pochettino – that he really burst onto the scene, though.

2014-15 saw Kane score 21 league goals in 34 appearances, establishing himself as Tottenham’s main striker as well as breaking into the England senior squad. Many detractors felt that he would be a “one-season wonder”, but 2015-16 saw him destroy that idea by scoring another 25 Premier League goals.

Since then, Kane has gone on to register more and more goals each season – scoring his 100th Premier League goal in February 2018 in just his 141st appearance, a record beaten only by Alan Shearer’s century in 124 games.

The 2017-18 season saw him score 41 goals in all competitions, and then captain England to their first World Cup semi-final in nearly 2 decades, winning the Golden Boot in the process.

At the time of writing, Kane has scored 181 goals for Tottenham in just 278 appearances, putting him 3rd in the club’s all-time scoring charts behind only Bobby Smith and Jimmy Greaves. And at just 26 years old, he’s got plenty of time to find his way to the top of that list, too. Simply put, Kane is arguably the best Spurs academy product of all time.