Kevin De Bruyne changed Pep Guardiola
And he changed English football in the process
Kevin De Bruyne must be one of the most iron-willed people in football.
After impressing as a youngster at Belgian Pro League club Genk, Chelsea signed him in 2012 as part of their infamous “loan army” project. As expected, he was sent out to Werder Bremen for a year, impressing with ten goals and nine assists at just 21 years old. The plan, I’d imagine, was to send him out on another loan before Chelsea – who bought De Bruyne for just £7 million – could sell him at a healthy profit. But he didn’t want a loan. He signed a contract with Chelsea, so he wanted to prove himself at Stamford Bridge, in the Premier League, under the great José Mourinho.
He started two of the Blues’ first three league games of the season, playing on the right in a 4-2-3-1 shape. Chelsea, though, were in the process of signing Willian to play that position, and De Bruyne was shunted to the bench. He would not start another game for the club. Many players would lose confidence and probably accept a loan move away, but not De Bruyne, who seemed clear in his head that he wanted to be part of something permanent. He joined Wolfsburg for £18m the following January and became a pretty fast success. No player in the 2014-15 Bundesliga season managed as many goals and assists combined as De Bruyne. The Bundesliga was a stronger league a decade ago than it is today, with Pep Guardiola’s Bayern in their pomp. To outperform Robert Lewandowski, Thomas Müller and Arjen Robben was serious business.
There’s probably a world in which De Bruyne joins them at Bayern, but he didn’t want that. He had unfinished business in the Premier League, and jumped at the chance to join Manchester City for £55m, the kind of figure that must have infuriated Chelsea executives who let him go for so much less.
City signed De Bruyne at a moment when they were really trying to figure out what they were supposed to be as a football club. After winning the title in Manuel Pellegrini’s first season, they never looked like catching Chelsea in his second. They felt – and were – old and stale. The team was still dominated by the same four players as it had been under Roberto Mancini’s reign: Vincent Kompany, Yaya Touré, David Silva and Sergio Agüero. It needed freshening up.
De Bruyne came to Manchester very late in the summer 2015 transfer window and suffered a knee injury in January that kept him out until April. He was largely playing out wide on the right. But his qualities were nonetheless obvious enough that everyone could see how important he was going to be for Man City. There was just a very obvious elephant in the room that everything was about to change once Guardiola arrived.
De Bruyne didn’t really feel like any player Guardiola had great success with. At Barcelona, he used central midfielders who could keep possession in almost any situation, while his wide players were usually nimble, making sprints in behind. De Bruyne at the time was seen as a number ten or wide player, and not someone who made nimble movements in tight spaces. He’s always tended to gallop rather than glide and, more importantly, take risks in possession. He’s always had a relatively low pass completion rate because he’s looking to play the killer ball rather than hold onto possession. He does not have pausa, the technique so prized in Spain and Latin America, of putting your foot over the ball and waiting for space to open up. He is, in so many ways, the last type of player you’d expect to thrive under Guardiola.
And City had other players on the books. Fernandinho was a safe bet to play as the deepest midfielder. The club had just signed İlkay Gündoğan at Guardiola’s request, presumably to play something loosely like the “Xavi role”. David Silva, meanwhile, seemed the most natural fit in the world for the new manager, likely as the most advanced player in a midfield three. Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sané and Nolito (you forgot he played for Man City, didn’t you?) were more direct wide options better suited to what the Catalan likes in that role. It wasn’t that hard to imagine De Bruyne falling by the wayside.
You don’t need me to tell you that he absolutely did not fall by the wayside. Guardiola stuck with his Bayern side’s attacking structure that kept the wingers high and wide wide, but this time it had more emphasis on getting the ball to them through the midfield, sort of. De Bruyne and Silva were nominally central midfielders, but with instruction to push higher up the pitch as what became known as “free eights”. Silva was all about moving through tight spaces and finding pausa, but De Bruyne could play the killer pass that split a team open to pick out Sterling or Sané. As I wrote a few years back,
“If Silva was all about control and slowing things down, then De Bruyne is the exact opposite. His game is, to use Guardiola’s word, movement, and speeding things up. That might be why the Silva/De Bruyne axis has been the most deadly creative midfield pair the Premier League has seen. Silva could kill you by making time stop, and De Bruyne could kill you at a thousand miles per hour. Either way, you’re toast.”
That team was all about De Bruyne coming into the right half-space and picking out whoever he wanted. It helped that he had the outstanding work rate and energy to press as the side needed. City did not have a controller in midfield of the sort Guardiola previously relied on. The team put much more emphasis on moving the ball out wide quickly, and that was all about De Bruyne.
That side had to be rebuilt and adapted to changing faces. After some turbulence, City won the title again in 2020/21 with a pretty different side. The midfield was rebuilt around Rodri and Gündoğan, emphasising a slower and more patient buildup closer to what we’d seen from Guardiola’s Barcelona. It was not the De Bruyne team, in part due to his injury issues. As time went on, he would often feature upfront as a false nine. In an era when City became much more about control and patient passing, De Bruyne became the exception, the one player allowed to do things differently.
For someone with such a clearly defined skillset, De Bruyne has been shockingly adaptable. He was always intelligent enough to adapt his skillset to the new situation. He went from someone who thrived as a wide player in a transition-system to the playmaker in Guardiola’s positional scheme. But he adapted without ever really changing his game. He did the same things with and without the ball, but he understood how to deploy them in different situations.
And so he comes to the end of his time in Manchester. It wasn’t really his call. "I have not had any [contract] offer the whole year”, he explained recently, claiming City “just took a decision”. It is, on the one hand, pretty cold. De Bruyne sees a lot of Virgil van Dijk, living nearby and having children who are friends with the Liverpool captain’s kids. I’d have to think he’s looked at Van Dijk’s new contract at Liverpool with some confusion that City don’t see him in the same way. But it makes sense at the Etihad: this team badly needs refreshing. De Bruyne is going to play less and less football. It’s better to get his wages off the books now and give that money to individuals likely to be the future instead of the past. City aren’t falling for nostalgia here.
I don’t think City will really try to replace him in the truest sense. De Bruyne has been injured for significant stretches and Guardiola has never really sought to find someone of similar profile. I think City are more likely to double down on the kind of mobile attacking midfielders who can press and retain possession, like Phil Foden or Bernardo Silva. I think we’ll see an even greater emphasis on keeping it neat and tidy, being press-resistant, and sticking to the planned possession structures.
De Bruyne was an exception. He was the one allowed to find the pass and open up the game. He was the player so different that Guardiola had to adapt to accommodate him, but it was a simple choice because he’s an intelligent enough player to adapt himself. He’s arguably only the second player to make Guardiola change after, well, that guy from Rosario. City’s next iteration likely won’t have such a player. It will be more structured and, if things don’t work out, more predictable. Sometimes you need that joker in the pack to shake things up.