To say a new signing is ‘a revelation’ is usually hyperbole. To say that of a player in Manchester City’s already star-studded lineup is perhaps even more rare. But at this point, if Kevin De Bruyne keeps up his scintillating form, he may just be worthy of the title ‘epiphany.’
At minimum, limiting ourselves to one week and one competition, we can say that Kevin De Bruyne was the Champions League hero in Manchester from mid-week. After Manchester United only managed a 1-1 draw against CSKA Moscow, the newly minted City man saved his side from the same fate with a 91st minute goal, an excellent low left-footed strike off the counterattack that secured all three points for Manchester City in their 2-1 victory over Sevilla. In that match, and with that goal De Bruyne’s versatility was put on display. He started the game as an attacking midfielder, then moving up to play as an out-and-out striker—and ultimately scoring the winner—after Wilfred Bony was removed.
A former Chelsea player, Kevin De Bruyne is no stranger to life in the British Premier League. Likely to his chagrin however, until this season, he was something of a stranger to Premier League football. After signing from Genk in 2012, the Belgian international only managed to make it onto the pitch a handful of times at Stamford bridge. After a successful loan spell at Werder Bremen in 2013, De Bruyne still couldn’t manage to find himself in manager Jose Mourinho’s plans. With less than 200 minutes on the pitch in a Chelsea shirt, De Bruyne was sold to Wolfsburg for a fee in the region of €20 million.
And then he tore it up.
In the 2014-2015 campaign, Kevin De Bruyne bagged himself sixteen goals and twenty-seven assists through all competitions. With just over forty total appearances—more than ten times what he had at Chelsea—to see two matches go by without either a goal or an assist from De Bruyne was a rare feat. The Belgian playmaker helped his side earn runners-up honors in the Bundesliga which, with Bayern Munich’s record-breaking title pace, was still a remarkable achievement.
But what would prove to be De Bruyne’s last goal for Wolfsburg was also his most crucial, as it came in the DFB Pokal (the German Football Association Cup) Final against Borussia Dortmund. Dortmund had taken only 3 minutes to score the games opener, but Wolfsburg fought back valiantly to deny Jurgen Klopp a fairytale sendoff. After Luis Gustavo had leveled the match in the 22nd minute, De Bruyne scored his team’s go-ahead goal in the 33rd, and Wolfsburg would go on to win their first ever Pokal 3-1.
Kevin De Bruyne may have only spent one season with Wolfsburg, but he helped them make history before being bought by Manchester City for a whopping £54 million.
At this point in the season, it may be premature to draw up a shortlist of candidates for the Premier League’s Player of the Year, but even if its early, at this stage, no list could be complete without De Bruyne’s name on it. Through five BPL games, De Bruyne has three goals and three assists. In all competitions, he’s appeared for City nine times, with five goals and four assists.
The Premier League is often lauded by its supporters as ‘the greatest league in the world,’ but for Kevin De Bruyne, there seem to be no growing pains—he’s on pace to put up just as astounding numbers in England this season as he did in Germany last year. With the translation of his form to English football, many Chelsea supporters are finding themselves—amid their team’s woeful form—looking to Mourinho asking, politely (or not), “Excuse us Special One, but, WTF?”
Even before the ink had dried on De Bruyne’s Manchester City contract, Mourinho was already on the offensive, questioning his former player’s ability to cope with the Premier League, and deriding his mentality, his work ethic. “He told me it was not in his personality to be competing for a position in the team,” the Portuguese manager said. “He needed a team where he knows he can play every game. He needs to know that he is important.”
If De Bruyne was as forthright as the Chelsea manager suggests, then, according to the player himself, he’d had precious few opportunities to be. De Bruyne recently said in an interview that, during his time at Stamford bridge, Mourinho only spoke to him twice. “I didn’t get any explanation [for my lack of playing time],” De Bruyne claimed. “I only talked with him twice, Mourinho.” Frustrated with his lack of minutes, and with his poor rapport with the manager, De Bruyne ultimately asked to be given the chance to play elsewhere. “And then one week before January, that’s the day I said I wanted to go out because even if I was training better, I was not getting any minutes. So for me personally, it was better to go.”
De Bruyne’s story brings to mind another fantastic young midfielder: Paul Pogba. Having played with Manchester United through most of his teen years, when Pogba was 19, he secured a move away from Old Trafford, where another iconic manager, Alex Ferguson, watched him depart the club. And, similarly to De Bruyne, the young attacking midfielder proceeded to make waves on the continent, developing quickly into one of Europe’s best attack-minded midfielders at Juventus, and likewise helping his team win silverware.
Certainly United fans can commiserate with Chelsea supporters (well, at least to a degree) in lamenting the loss of a fantastic midfielder who’s since flourished elsewhere, questioning the decision to let them leave in the first place. Behind the scenes, however, the two departures look very different. While De Bruyne claimed he only spoke to Mourinho twice in their time together, Ferguson had tried desperately to keep Pogba, blaming the young player’s agent for his departure.
“There are one or two football agents I simply do not like, and Mino Raiola, Paul Pogba’s agent is one of them. I distrusted him from the moment I met him….We had Paul under a three-year contract, and it had a one-year renewal option which we were eager to sign. But Raiola suddenly appeared on the scene and our first meeting was a fiasco. He and I were like oil and water. From then on, our goose was cooked because Raiola had been able to ingratiate himself with Paul and his family and the player signed with Juventus.”
This, of course, his not totally out of step with Mourinho’s post-facto comments. After the young talent has departed and succeeded elsewhere, one manager blames a pushy and manipulative agent, the other claims the player wasn’t cooperative in his team. But Ferguson has some corroborating evidence that he in fact did everything in his power to keep the young French wunderkind from leaving Manchester.
Last season, Patrice Evra—who joined Pogba at Juventus—defended his former manager, saying that Alex Ferguson did absolutely everything in his power to keep Pogba. “Ferguson knew that Pogba would become very strong, but also that he could not force the issue,” Evra said. The talismanic manager even went so far as to orchestrate a house-call to try and convince Pogba to sign with United. “Sir Alex Ferguson sent me to his house to convince him to stay [at Manchester United] — he wept, he did not sleep, because he knew that he could become better than Vieira, but he had decided.”
If United supporters rue their loss of Pogba, they can at least be content that their manager foresaw the player’s future success, and did everything possible to keep him. As the season moves on, and as Chelsea flounder and De Bruyne flourishes, the fans at Stamford Bridge may not feel quite as confident that their own Special One made the same effort.