Will Harry Kane bank notes really sell for £50,000?

Micro-engraver Graham Short made six of the notes after Kane won the Golden Boot for scoring the most goals in the 2018 World Cup

So you've popped to the shop to pick a few bits up and are handed a Harry Kane fiver in your change - but can you really expect to make £50,000?

One of the six £5 notes, engraved with the image of the England striker, has gone into circulation in Merthyr Tydfil.

Micro-engraver Graham Short chose his subject after Kane won the Golden Boot for scoring the most goals during the 2018 World Cup.

And the banknotes were insured by the Tony Huggins-Haig Gallery for £50,000 each.

It is not the first time Mr Short's sterling work has been highly valued with a portrait of the Queen on a pinhead being sold for £100,000 in 2016.

And the artist previously etched Jane Austen on to four new £5 notes when they were first circulated and those were also valued at £50,000 (one remains in circulation by the way).

One of those fivers raised £6,000 at auction for Children in Need which is a great deal more than the £5 face value but still £44,000 less than £50k.

So what is the reality of making a small fortune from a fiver?

• What happened to the fivers 'worth £50,000'?

• The artist who carves on pinheads

Valuer Paul Murray, an auctioneer at Warwick & Warwick which holds regular auctions of bank notes said until one of the Kane notes is sold, it would be impossible to guess how much people would be willing to pay.

Harry Kane won the Golden Boot for scoring the most goals during the 2018 World Cup

But he said: "Fifty thousand is a little excessive."

"You see it all the time with these notes. If you look on Ebay for the AK47 notes you see people asking for £1,000, well at the end of the day they are actually worth £5."

With the Harry Kane notes he said people could expect to make a profit, but whether that would be £500 or £5,000 was impossible to predict - but believed £50,000 was very unlikely.

"You can't put your hand on your heart and say that's what it's worth - it's hard when nothing similar is being sold," he said.

"You might have some collector with a lot of money, but really it's a £5 note which has been defaced.

"But there are only six of them, and if only one is found and someone with a lot of money wants it, I don't know....

"But if [the estimate] is too high, people might be less likely to bid."

Money specialist website Change Checker says the phenomenon of people spending big money on banknotes depends on the notes having "an interesting story behind them".

It said: "AA01 banknotes were part of the first batch of banknotes printed or serial number AK47 have been particularly popular thanks to the machine gun connotations.

"It really is just personal preference and what someone is willing to pay to have a certain banknote in their collection."

So until someone finds a Harry Kane fiver and tries to sell it at auction, the answer of whether it truly is worth £50k remains a mystery.