The hero of the English national team is called Harry Kane: He led his team into the European Championship final as captain. As a schoolboy he met his idol David Beckham – and his current wife Katie.
There’s this photo from 2005. David Beckham is posing with a selection of children on the occasion of the opening of his newly founded football academy in London. Beckham was 29 years old at the time and the captain of England’s national soccer team. A year earlier, England had been eliminated in the quarter-finals of the European Championships – because Beckham had missed the decisive penalty.
Now the Three Lions are in a European Championship final for the first time, thanks to a – not undisputed – penalty in stoppage time of the semi-final against Denmark. The penalty was converted by Harry Kane, captain of the English national team since the 2018 World Cup. At the age of 24 he was the youngest captain of the tournament and was the most successful scorer with six goals. At the current Euro 2020 he has scored three goals so far.
Believe it or not, Harry Kane is the chubby boy who stands next to Beckham in the 2005 photo. He was eleven years old at the time and played for the youth team at Tottenham Hotspur – the club he is loyal to to this day, even if he was loaned out to other clubs in between.
Harry Kane and his wife have known each other since school days
Even more curious is the fact that Beckham’s left is a girl named Katie Goodland – she is now the wife of Harry Kane. Both attended the same school, fell in love at the age of 14. The crush turned into real love: Kane and Goodland have been a couple since 2011. In July 2017, he proposed marriage to her in the Bahamas, a few months after the birth of their first daughter Ivy. The wedding followed in 2019. The Kanes now have two more children, daughter Vivienne and son Louis.
In a personal letter posted by Katie Goodland on Instagram, the 28-year-old recalls Kane’s beginnings on the football field. “I laughed at you when we started dating and you practiced penalty shootouts with my brother Tom and our dog Seamus and you said that one day you would be captain of the England team.” She is now incredibly proud of her husband. “When I started to write down (…) everything you are doing for our country, tears came to me. You are just a wonderful husband and father and the children can hardly wait to have you back home” says Goodland. She ends her letter by saying they have become something of a battle cry from the English: “Bring it home.”
Because Harry Kane wants to triumph with his team against the Italians and win the European title. Something that David Beckham never managed to do as a captain. And his large-scale football academy was not crowned with success either: in 2009, four years after it opened, it was closed again.
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