Manchester City letting irreplaceable Kevin De Bruyne go is a mistake

Kevin De Bruyne bid an emotional farewell to the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday night, as his 10-year association with the club draws to a close.

The links to Napoli suggest that it’s not just Manchester City fans who are seeing the last of De Bruyne, but the Premier League as a whole.

You can point to his declining physical attributes and his presumably hefty wage demands as legitimate reasons to let De Bruyne leave as he prepares to celebrate his 34th birthday, but in letting De Bruyne go, he’ll need replacing, and City are about to find out how tough a task that is.

It’s a task made all the more difficult given that there hasn’t been anybody with De Bruyne’s unique skill set in the game for the last 10 years and there isn’t one now.

The younger De Bruyne could pick up the ball anywhere on the pitch and rampage through defences, single-handedly tearing teams apart. He was able to play defence-splitting through balls while running at full speed, or unleash at goal from wherever he felt like, finding the net more often than he had any right to.

While his advancing age means we don’t get to see those terrorising runs as often, he’s still the most creative player in the Premier League.

This season alone, De Bruyne ranks first in the Premier League for key passes and expected assists per 90, second for passes into the penalty area and fourth for progressive passes per 90. The return of Rodri will help, but City will need an incisive passer to complement the ball-carrying skills of Phil Foden, Savio and Jeremy Doku.

Kevin De Bruyne departs Manchester City after scoring 108 goals and registering 177 assists

At his best – which we seemed to see more often than not – De Bruyne was unstoppable. He was stronger and faster than most players who dared to stand in his way and his supreme playmaking was complemented by having a Sergio Aguero or Erling Haaland ahead of him.

It appeared that De Bruyne had a telepathic understanding with the strikers he played with; in reality, the strikers he played with knew that if they found themselves in the most opportune place to score a goal, the ball would find them.

There was the goal against Luton in the FA Cup, where as soon as Haaland saw who had the ball, he sprinted towards goal and didn’t look back. There was no checking over his shoulder to see if the pass had been played, yet as if by magic, the ball appeared in front of him to score. Haaland took the headlines that night with his five goals, but it was De Bruyne who stole the show with four assists.

De Bruyne arrived in the Premier League as something of a mystery. The back pages called him the £60m reject, not entirely unfairly, as the Belgian had been cast out from the Premier League 18 months earlier, showing little to suggest he'd become a £60m player from the brief glimpses we saw of him at Chelsea.

But those paying closer attention would see that in his 18 months with Wolfsburg, he took the Bundesliga by storm, registering a ridiculous 30 goal contributions and winning the league’s Player of the Year in his only full season there. Manchester City were willing to take the gamble.

De Bruyne was an instant hit. It wasn’t until his second season that he combined with Pep Guardiola, and not until his third season that Guardiola’s formula clicked, but as soon as it did there was no turning back.

In every season bar his injury-plagued 2018/19 campaign, De Bruyne reached double figures for non-penalty goals and assists and if he wasn’t feeding his supporting cast, he’d take the goalscoring mantle himself.

City, with De Bruyne pulling the strings, would establish themselves as the world’s best team, winning seven out of seven Premier League titles, and coming second in the year they didn’t win it (with De Be Bruyne recording a career-best 33 goal contributions).

Unlike many of the Premier League greats, De Bruyne doesn’t really have one defining moment, and his record in big games is perhaps the only thing you could hold against him. While Guardiola took most of the flak for his side failing on the biggest stages prior to their UEFA Champions League win, his biggest players often escaped criticism.

When teams achieve great things, it’s on the back of great moments, and it’s great players that provide those moments, not great managers.

But on 9th May 2023, with Manchester City chasing the Treble, De Bruyne shifted that narrative somewhat. Trailing 1-0 in the Bernabeu in the 67th minute of a UEFA Champions League semi-final, De Bruyne unleashed a ferocious first-time strike from the edge of the area that arrowed into the bottom corner of the Real Madrid goal like an Exocet missile. It’s impossible to conceive of a ball being struck better than that, and it laid the platform for City to win 4-0 in the return leg.

It's the sort of goal he’d scored dozens of times in the Premier League, but we’d now seen it in perhaps the world’s most famous stadium when his team needed him most.

His goalscoring is perhaps one of the most underrated aspects of De Bruyne’s game. Since expected goals became widely used in 2017/18, De Bruyne has scored 55 non-penalty goals from 37.1 non-penalty expected goals. Much of this was down to his peerless long-range shooting, with nearly half of his Premier League goals coming from outside the box, but also his remarkable, supposedly weaker, left foot being responsible for nearly a third of them.

Purists decry the modern game taking the individuality out of football, that players all have their every movement and action dictated to them with creative freedom stripped away, but De Bruyne has flown in the face of that. It goes without saying that the best places to shoot from are as close to the goal as possible, and teams have all got wise to that, with fewer long shots being taken. The December 2006 Premier League Goal of the Month compilation will sadly never be seen again, but so many of De Bruyne’s strikes would be worthy contributions.

If De Bruyne has been told – correctly – that shooting from distance is usually a sub-optimal decision, he’s spent his career ignoring it. His expected goals per shot has always been below 0.10 and you’d expect it to be at least 0.13, with the most efficient shooters reaching around 0.15/0.16.

But when you’re as good as De Bruyne, whatever the ‘best’ or ‘correct’ decision is becomes irrelevant. De Bruyne is the anomaly that says shoot from wherever you damn well please.  

His catalogue of goals and assists are jaw-dropping, and as the first great wave of City legends moved aside, De Bruyne was tasked with replacing the likes of Vincent Kompany, David Silva and Sergio Aguero.

De Bruyne has been surrounded by world class players throughout his Manchester City and still stood head and shoulders above them.

He’s the greatest midfielder the Premier League has ever seen, irreplaceable both then and now, and City will soon realise that letting him go was a mistake.

Liam Williams

• Manchester City F.C.
• Premier League
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