Harry Kane has signed a new contract with Bayern Munich, making him the highest-paid player in the club's 126-year history, The Athletic reports. The deal comes weeks after the 33-year-old striker won the 2026 Ballon d'Or and shortly before he is set to become England's most-capped player during the November international break.
The new contract means Alan Shearer's Premier League scoring record of 260 goals remains out of reach for now, despite Kane trailing it by just 47 goals when he left Tottenham Hotspur for Bayern in August 2023. Kane scored 213 Premier League goals, a tally second only to Shearer's.
A turbulent start before the turnaround
Kane left Tottenham having come close to major trophies several times without winning one, including reaching the 2019 Champions League final, losing two EFL Cup finals and finishing as Premier League runners-up in 2016-17. His move to Bayern, worth more than €100million (£86.4m, $110m), was expected to deliver the silverware that had eluded him.
Despite scoring 44 goals in 45 games across all competitions in his debut season, Bayern finished trophyless under Thomas Tuchel - now his coach again with England - ending third in the Bundesliga and losing in the Champions League semi-finals. That led to a change in the dugout, with Vincent Kompany taking charge in July 2024, the same summer Michael Olise joined from Crystal Palace. Luis Diaz arrived from Liverpool the following summer.
With Kompany in charge, Kane, Olise and Diaz have helped Bayern win Bundesliga titles in each of the past two seasons, including a domestic treble in 2025-26. All three players featured in this year's top 25 of the Ballon d'Or voting, with Olise finishing ninth and Diaz 24th.
Accepting the Ballon d'Or at the London Palladium, Kane said: "My Bayern Munich team-mates: without you guys, it wouldn't be possible. The way you guys push me, the way we compete, it just makes me a better player. Makes me want to improve."
Setting Bundesliga scoring records
Kane became the fastest player to reach 50 Bundesliga goals, doing so in 43 games in November 2024, and the fastest to 100, reaching the mark in 98 games this September. He is now on 102 goals in 102 Bundesliga appearances, surpassing the scoring pace of some of the league's most prolific forwards, including Gerd Muller and Robert Lewandowski.
Learning from how Bayern lost Lewandowski and Alaba
Bayern have not always extended lucrative deals to departing stars. Lewandowski left for Barcelona as a free agent in the summer of 2022, the same age Kane is now, telling the media that his story with Bayern had come to an end. According to an interview his agent gave to German newspaper Bild, Lewandowski felt disrespected after the club's hesitancy to offer a new deal and its apparent pursuit of a then-much-younger Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund. Bayern also lost Austria defender David Alaba to Real Madrid in the summer of 2021 after a similar contract stand-off. This new deal shows the club was not prepared to take the same risk with Kane.
Kane could have returned to England to add to his Premier League tally and has expressed an interest in a future Major League Soccer career, but at 33 he continues to thrive at Bayern, the club with whom he won the Ballon d'Or. Three more years in Germany offer a greater likelihood of silverware than a return to the Premier League, with Bayern reaching at least the Champions League quarter-finals in 13 of the past 14 completed seasons and winning the competition twice in that time.
Kane missed a penalty for league leaders Bayern in last weekend's first-versus-second 'Der Klassiker' against Dortmund, which ended 2-2, though he has continued to operate effectively in a deeper, playmaking role. Speaking to The Athletic in August, he explained: "It's easy for a team to say that they're going to press us man-for-man, but it takes a lot to actually do that. If you're a centre-back and you're marking me and I then drop around the halfway line, you might feel comfortable going that far. But if I then drop a little deeper, then all of a sudden you're a centre-back and you're playing as the highest presser. It takes a lot of practice from the opposition and their coach to really commit to that."
A creative force beyond goals
Kane's passing range separates him from other prolific strikers. Since joining Bayern, he has created 119 chances in league games only - more than any other striker across Europe's top five leagues except Kylian Mbappe, who has 158 for Paris Saint-Germain and now Real Madrid. No player at his position has more assists than Kane's 27; Ollie Watkins, who left Aston Villa for Al Hilal in the summer, is second with 24.
Off the pitch, Kane was chosen by Skechers to lead the brand's move into football, signing a lifetime deal days after joining Bayern in the summer of 2023.
Kane is Bayern's first Ballon d'Or winner since fellow striker Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in the early 1980s. He is also England's captain and record goalscorer with 91 goals, currently level with Peter Shilton's 125 caps, and is expected to move clear of Shilton during the November international break's Nations League matches against Croatia at home and world champions Spain away.
