Goodnight sweet prince

Paying tribute to one of Manchester City's and the Premier League's all-time greats, Kevin De Bruyne

“I have officially stopped caring whether City sign Kevin De Bruyne or not.”

Those were the foolish words I distinctly remember posting on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter back in the summer of 2015.

In my defence, I was living in Australia at the time, and the only way I could get the latest news about European football was either by staying up really late at night or getting up really early in the morning, and I was pig sick of a will-he-won’t-he transfer saga which had already rumbled on for a couple of months by this point.

I also couldn’t help thinking…well...is he actually any good?

City’s transfer business tended to be very hit and miss in those days, with what felt like more misses than hits. For every Fernandinho or Raheem Sterling, there was a Fernando, a Wilfried Bony, a Nicolás Otamendi (who did eventually come good) or an Eliaquim Mangala (and I could go on).

My slight scepticism about De Bruyne isn’t quite as embarrassing in retrospect as The Mirror’s infamous ‘£60m reject’ back page, or Paul Merson’s scathing critique on Sky Sports News, but I’m certainly glad the club had more patience than I did and saw the saga through to its conclusion that summer.

I was pleased when we got the deal over the line, and a YouTube compilation of his Wolfsburg highlights was enough to convince me we’d bagged a quality player (although I’m still scarred from being catfished by Georgios Samaras on YouTube), but it would take De Bruyne a little while to truly make his mark as a City player.

There were some good moments in that first season for sure, most notably his goal against PSG to seal City’s first ever Champions League semi-final, but Kevin was little more than a talented player in a dysfunctional team that year, led by an uninspiring manager who had a tendency to get less than the sum of its parts out of the contraption at his disposal.

It’s strange to think now, but City were still quite rudderless as an organisation a decade ago. Sure they’d won the league under Mancini and again with Pellegrini, but they’d barely made an impression on European football, and hadn’t even properly begun fleecing their supporters and trying to turn the stadium into a massive theme park yet. They might not have had even one official ticket resale partner back then, never mind eight!

It wasn’t until the club made its “greatest ever bit of recruitment” (Burns, R, 2016) and hired Pep Guardiola the year after De Bruyne’s arrival that things really began to change for the better, although even that would have to simmer on the hob for a year before it truly came to the boil.

For my money, De Bruyne’s peak as a City player came in the 2017/18 season, when City got 100 points and won the first Premier League title of the Guardiola era. Kevin got 12 goals and 21 assists that year, which isn’t his highest return, but there were some incredible moments that season - such as his goal away at Chelsea, his stunning performance in the 7-2 win over Stoke, his left-footed thunderbastard against Leicester and his right-footed thunderbastard against Swansea - which stick out in my memory perhaps more than anything that came after.

City were arguably a better team when they won the league again with 98 points the following year, but they had to do without De Bruyne for much of it due to injury, which restricted him to 20 fewer appearances than the year before. He was an unused sub in the famous 2-1 win over Liverpool in the January, and didn’t start at Brighton on the final day, which shows how little he was relied upon that year.

He contributed much more as City struggled to a second-placed finish in 2019/20, scoring some great goals away at Newcastle and Arsenal, to name just two. And he played a fundamental role in the title returning to the Etihad in 2020/21, although that campaign ended in tears when he had to go off after having his face smashed in by Antonio Rüdiger’s thuggery in the Champions League final, which City lost to Chelsea.

There were a few occasions during De Bruyne’s near-decade of decadence at City that I worried injuries would curtail his career, and as he struggled to regain full fitness in the early months of the 2021/22 season, I wondered whether his best years were already behind him.

But he bounced back in a big way that year, scoring 19 goals (his best scoring season in a City shirt), including four in an outrageous virtuoso display at Wolves, and assisting Ilkay Gündogan for the title-winning goal against Aston Villa on the final day.

And when it comes to assists, it’s hard to imagine a better individual season for that particular metric than 2022/23, when the Belgian maestro racked up a scarcely believable 31 in 49 games, with 18 coming in the Premier League and seven in the Champions League, as City won an unforgettable Treble.

De Bruyne of course holds the record for the best minutes-per-assist ratio (177) in Premier League history, and while I’m sometimes inclined to agree with those who feel it’s quite a misleading stat, it’s impossible to deny that City have had the best assister in the business over the last 10 years.

While some assists can just be a simple lay-off before the goalscorer does all the hard work themselves, the majority of De Bruyne’s were eye-of-the-needle passes, or crosses onto a sixpence that only he could have pulled off. Time and time again, he'd pick his team-mate out to score when even they didn’t realise they were in space, and I’m betting it will be a while before we see a playmaker of his calibre again.

Recency bias is endemic in football, and there is a temptation to proclaim every new kid that comes onto the block as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Tentative debates have already begun about whether De Bruyne is the Premier League’s greatest ever foreign import, which is always going to be a matter of opinion, and perhaps we won’t truly appreciate how good he was until his time at the top is firmly in the rearview mirror.

On the flip side, you have those who aren’t even willing to entertain the notion that modern players could be better than the legends who graced the English game during the Premier League’s so-called Golden Era of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Why just the other day, I saw someone suggesting that De Bruyne shouldn’t even be in the same conversation as the likes of Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira and Bryan Robson when we talk about all-time greats.

I found that take particularly puzzling, because it certainly doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when you compare those players’ medal hauls with De Bruyne’s. Only Keane (7) won more Premier League titles than De Bruyne’s six, and Vieira and Robson never won the Champions League.

Those guys were fantastic players without a shadow of a doubt, but I would argue that as well as having better numbers than all of them, De Bruyne was also a better and more complete technical footballer than all of them. There have been few finer sights over the years than Kevin puffing out his pink cheeks, grabbing the ball and striding purposely over the halfway line, before playing in a team-mate with a millimetre-perfect pass or finding the top corner himself with either his stronger right or his supposedly weaker left foot. I’m going to miss it immensely.

Maybe rather than recency bias I’m simply expressing good, old fashioned bias here, but you can stick your Keanes, Vieiras and Robsons up your arse as far as I'm concerned (if you ask me, the Premier League’s greatest ever foreign import is still Thierry Henry).

You could say that limping out of two Champions League finals and also failing to lead Belgium’s Golden Generation to anything tangible will go down as significant blots on De Bruyne’s copybook, and it’s also a real shame that his career as even a Premier League-level player now appears to be over at the age of 33.

After coming back from major hamstring surgery with a delightful goal and assist at Newcastle last season, I hoped De Bruyne’s career had cheated death once again, and we’d get at least a couple more strong years out of him.

A less sentimental club might have quit while it was ahead and let De Bruyne go last summer, when he was clearly a bit past it but still not quite finished. Instead he stayed, and it has been tough to watch him struggling to recapture his former greatness this season. Unfortunately he is, as the kids say, now completely washed.

A part of me still hoped he would get another year’s contract extension, and could stick around as a leader in the dressing room for the next generation to look up to next season. But Friday’s announcement that he will be leaving at the end of the season was both unsurprising and understandable. The time is right.

The last couple of months of the season already feel a bit like a funeral for somebody who isn’t dead yet, and it was quite painful to watch De Bruyne’s half-deceased cadaver huffing and puffing around the Old Trafford pitch during Sunday’s dismal derby. His brain is still sharp as a dagger, but his body won’t do what it once could anymore, and the rapidity of his decline has been pretty heartbreaking to witness.

I just hope we get one more moment of genius from him before he goes, and that he leaves the club having lifted the FA Cup as captain. I’d also like to think there’s still a decent footballing project out there for him, but if he decides he’s better off going to Saudi Arabia and phoning it in while earning an obscene amount of money, I wouldn’t begrudge him that either.

I could never have imagined back in the summer of 2015 that City were about to sign a player who would become one of the club’s all-time greats, and one of the finest footballers I have ever seen. It has been an absolute privilege to watch him, and his contribution is worthy of a statue, or some other form of permanent recognition. Perhaps they could name the breakfast buffet at the new North Stand hotel in his honour (that’s a joke, before you start getting any ideas City).

Footballers like Kevin De Bruyne don’t come along every day. Enjoy them while you can.

Dan