Tottenham face Barcelona in the Champions League on Wednesday night and ahead of the game, Harry Kane has revealed he wants to score more goals than Lionel Messi over the course of his career which is so hilarious I couldn’t not comment on his assertion.

Yes, yes, I know. We are long past the point where we can deny that Harry Kane is a top striker, but one that can outscore Messi? Hilarious.

“He set the standard, I think him and [Cristiano] Ronaldo have gone above the normal standard that other people have set in the years gone by,” Kane said.

“When you’re scoring as many goals as he is, 40 or 50, 60 goals a season, as a striker, I want to try and match that, try and do the same. He’s definitely set the standard for the rest of us. He is still scoring goals and, for me, it motivates me to get even better and improve, and one day score as many, if not more, than he has.”

I came across this quote in Matt Law’s Daily Telegraph article which is almost as funny. “Messi has scored 103 Champions League goals, while Kane has just nine,” Law writes. “But, should Kane score tonight, he would have reached double figures in 12 games, almost half the time it took Messi.”

So, let’s take a look at what Kane needs to do to surpass Messi’s goal tally.

Messi has 560 goals for Barcelona’s first team. Harry Kane has 145 for Spurs. Messi is, of course, six years older than Kane, so that gives the Englishman 72 months to score 415 goals.

That’s almost 70 a season or, if you prefer, almost eight goals a month for the next six years, including the summer when they don’t even play.

Yes, of course, it’s good to have lofty ambitions but this is not, as Matt Law states, the same as declaring you want to be the Golden Boot winner at the World Cup.