After almost an entire season of delays, Tottenham's new stadium is open for business. The U-18s beat Southampton in the first match there but Harry Kane will soon get his chance to make a mark. Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

There are players who make you gasp when you watch them, the ones who race across the field like wild horses. Then there's Harry Kane. He runs with a slight stumble, like somebody keeps pushing him from behind. Tall and gangly, he shuffles into a scrum of defenders with the ball and it's always a surprise to see him emerge with it on the other side. He isn't having a particularly impressive afternoon, you're thinking, except -- whoa! -- there's a goal with a perfectly placed header off a corner, and -- wait! -- there's another off a rifled shot with time waning. Then the game is over, Spurs have won and Kane has done simply everything.

Until recently, those who mattered didn't know what to make of Kane. He was cut from Arsenal's program as a preteen because he was "chubby and not very athletic," the club's longtime youth director revealed to an Italian newspaper. He shouldn't be embarrassed about it because everyone else got Kane wrong too. After a wasted year in Watford, he ended up with Tottenham's juniors, where he'd wanted to be from the start. There too, nobody seemed to think Kane had a future except Kane himself. "My aim was always Spurs," he says. "It was playing for Spurs in the Premier League. And from the time that I was 14 or 15 and I started to get better and better, I realized it was a goal that I could actually get to. There were times when it started to look unlikely, but that was always my mindset."

"It would be a wrench for him to leave Tottenham and go somewhere else. If he goes anywhere, it would be Real Madrid. He's a Real Madrid kind of player." - Tim Sherwood, on Harry Kane's future

A handful of players at every academy are prized commodities, fawned over by coaches and whispered about by devoted fans. The others fill the space around them. At every level, Kane seemed to be just good enough. "Did he look like he would be an England captain and a top international striker? You would have to say no," says Russell Slade, who managed Leyton Orient in 2011 during Kane's five-month stay there, playing in the third tier of English football. "He was this skinny, gangly, 6-foot-4 17-year-old. Was he terrifically quick? Not really. But he maximized everything he had. And he had this great appetite to make a difference. He believed he could make a difference."

By then, Kane had already learned to cultivate his greatest skill, which is finding space to operate. Somehow, amid a crunch of defenders, he'll create enough room to receive a pass. "He can lose you in a telephone box," says Slade. "He only needs half a yard to get a shot off," says Jordan Pickford, the Everton goalkeeper, who plays with Kane for England. "And when he makes half a turn, he knows where the goal is without even looking. Nine times out of 10, that shot is going to be on target. Ask any defender -- he's very, very difficult to mark."

Kane showed that the next season at Millwall, one level up in the Sky Bet Championship, where he played when he was 18. In 14 games, he scored seven goals and it isn't hyperbolic to say that he saved the club from relegation. Still, that wasn't enough to keep him around White Hart Lane. At the start of the 2012-13 season, he was loaned to Norwich. The following January, he moved to Leicester. Along the way, Harry Redknapp had been replaced as Tottenham's manager by Andre Villas-Boas, but it hardly mattered. Villas-Boas looked at Kane and didn't see a Premier League player either.

Kane was on loan somewhere -- he doesn't even remember where, there were so many -- when he first became aware of Tom Brady.

"I started watching him on YouTube," Kane says. When he came across a documentary about the quarterback, he watched that too. "We've had a similar path being doubted when we were younger. Maybe not being the best athletes as kids." In Brady, who had willed his way to stardom by refusing to accept anyone else's judgment, Kane saw a finished version of himself. "It was quite a big inspiration," he adds. "Not many people thought he'd become that good, or even play in the NFL, and he went on to become the best ever. At the time, it gave me a real boost to say, look, anything is possible. If you have that self-belief and that drive and that hunger, you can do it."

While Brady was winning Super Bowls, Kane played in his first Premier League game for Spurs, against Newcastle in August 2012. He'd done what he'd set out to do; then he set out to do it every week. "He never felt he had a ceiling," says Tim Sherwood, who worked as Tottenham's first-team coach under Redknapp. "He still doesn't. Like the Lionel Messis and Cristiano Ronaldos of the world. He sees himself in that company." Even now, it sounds ridiculously brazen. But when Villas-Boas was fired by Tottenham, Sherwood was made the manager for the rest of the 2013-14 season while Spurs wooed Pochettino. He gave Kane a chance to play. "How did we know Frank Sinatra was a good singer until he sang onstage?" Sherwood asks.

That April 7, Sherwood started Kane against Sunderland. Kane scored. Sherwood started him in Tottenham's next game, at West Bromwich Albion. Kane scored. Sherwood started him against Fulham. Kane scored again. Kane started every game for the rest of the season.

Sherwood had found a Sinatra.

Out the train window, which is how you get the best view, it looks like a flying saucer. On the street it looms, gloriously but incongruously, over a neighborhood of ramshackle storefronts selling jerk chicken and calling cards to Africa. In early April, Tottenham's new stadium will finally be ready for a football match.

The designs for the new facility, advertised as the best in the world, were made in 2008. Since construction began in 2015, the projected opening date has been pushed back countless times, including almost on a match-by-match basis throughout the 2018-19 season. The delays left Tottenham lingering in their temporary home at Wembley, suitcases packed but nowhere to go. During that time, too, the cost -- bloated by overtime fees, nearly a season's worth of additional Wembley rentals and problems with the safety system -- has more than doubled, from roughly $600 million to more than $1.2 billion.

The idea of building a new stadium, which includes both an artificial surface for NFL games and a grass pitch, is meant to lift Spurs into the revenue-generating class of Arsenal, Chelsea and the Manchester clubs. Eventually a massive naming rights deal will be signed that may even approach the $500 million over 20 years that Levy is said to be seeking. For now, though, the stadium has become a very expensive, glass-and silver paneled millstone around his neck. The annual service on $800 million in loans will make splash spending nearly impossible this year, and perhaps years to come. Skeptics are quick to note that you can hardly spend less than literally nothing, but this isn't about adding quality as much as keeping the quality you have. "Arsenal suffered after they moved to their stadium," Pochettino says. "They struggled to keep their best players. I hope that will not happen here."

What Pochettino has accomplished in five years at Tottenham, blending tactical insights, motivational mastery and a dollop of magic, has been remarkable. But the standings function by wins, losses and draws, not expectations exceeded. The unavoidable question is whether the third-best team in England can keep the best striker in the world. History is skeptical. The reigning Ballon d'Or winner, Luka Modric, played at Tottenham until 2012, when he was lured away by Real Madrid. A year later, Gareth Bale left for the same team in what was at the time the most lucrative football transfer in history. "That chance to wear that white shirt of Real Madrid, quadruple your wage bill, win Champions League titles," says Sherwood. "It's hard to turn down."

Now Madrid is after Kane, by all accounts. The forces of battle are lining up predictably. On one side is loyalty to his lifelong club, and the immeasurable comfort of staying near home and his extended family. On the other is a sizable raise from his $13 million annual salary, coupled with the opportunity to play for a club successful enough to satisfy Kane's ambition to keep getting better even when he's already best. Real Madrid is suffering through its worst season in a generation, but an early Champions League exit is likely to push the team that has won the competition four times in the last five years to spend freely to return to a level of prominence that its supporters expect. "It would be a wrench for him to leave Tottenham and go somewhere else," Sherwood acknowledges. "He certainly wouldn't go anywhere else in the Premier League. If he goes anywhere, it would be Real Madrid. He's a Real Madrid kind of player."

Kane refuses to look down the road. "It's something you assess along the way," he says. Still, it's hard to imagine someone who identifies with a six-time Super Bowl champion remaining satisfied with a team that merely outperforms its wage bill. "A lot of people look at it and say this is maybe the best team we've had, maybe the best team we'll ever have, and the best manager, but it's important that we have something to show for it," he acknowledges. "It's not just, when we look back in 10 years, we had a great team. It's, 'Look what they did. Look what they won.' The challenge for us is, can we keep going up and up and up? It's going to be difficult in the next couple of years with the stadium and the finances."

When Pochettino arrived in the summer of 2014, he inherited two expensive strikers, Roberto Soldado and Emmanuel Adebayor. It didn't take long for him to realize that Kane would be his centerpiece. "He was improving and growing," Pochettino says. "We couldn't stop him. The moment that we started to work with him, he was so open to learn and improve. We just had to give him the space to show his quality and start to play, and he started to score goals and be fantastic."

Since then, their fortunes have been intertwined. "The journey at Spurs really started for me and him at the same time," Kane says. The presence of Kane, who signed a six-year contract extension last year, has fortified Pochettino against the advances of other clubs-including Real Madrid. Pochettino has also fielded at least preliminary inquiries from other teams, and linked with jobs from Manchester to, yes, Madrid. Seeing him commit to Spurs through 2023 helps Kane keep the faith. "We both want the same things," Kane says. "We both want to push and push and push, and work and work." But then he feels compelled to add, "We'll just have to see what happens this season, and go from there."