Not for the first time, Kevin De Bruyne read the situation to perfection. Not for the first time, he spotted the right play just a little earlier than everyone else. And of course this was always his gift: not simply to pick the right option but to do it faster than anyone else, buying him those crucial fractions of a second when everything else was in flux and only he in stillness.
And of course this was not the only respect in which De Bruyne understood the game of football better than most. As a struggling teenager in the Genk academy, he noticed the way the club abruptly stopped paying for a foster family to house him, and then quietly resumed when he started banging in goals for the second team. Cast adrift at Chelsea, he noticed how he was ignored while first-team players were lavished with attention and bespoke coaching.
Related: ‘One of the greatest’: De Bruyne hailed by Guardiola after confirming exit
In short, De Bruyne always intuited the brutal transactional nature of football, the way people hold doors open for you when things are going well, let them close when things are not. The way your only intrinsic worth is the worth you can provide to someone else. So far this season, he has provided Manchester City with just two league goals and 49% of the minutes for which he was available. His contract is up this summer. The pieces are moving, Kevin. The pass is on. All that remains is for you to play it.
And should he want to accept the offer of the Saudi Pro League, or indeed a top league in Europe, then it is a pass that probably needs to be played sooner rather than later. Aged 33, increasingly vulnerable to injury and with more than 50,000 minutes in his legs for club and country, his peak years are beginning to winnow away. Already two games a week at high intensity feels like a stretch. But in the good moments, when the ball rolls towards his feet and the pitch somehow seems to expand around him, he can still stir the imagination like few others alive.
Some will advocate De Bruyne as the Premier League’s greatest midfielder of all time. Some will insist he wasn’t even Manchester City’s. Personally I suspect he may ultimately slot into the Roy Keane bracket – obviously not in terms of skillset, but as a player who performed one particular midfield skill so outstandingly that their true all-round value will probably be forgotten a little by history. And in the same way that Keane’s aggression obscured his brilliant vision and distribution, there is perhaps a danger that De Bruyne will be remembered exclusively as a luxury pinger, a threader and a crosser, a ginger Beckham.
Which would of course be unfair. Because beyond his exquisite technique – and let’s face it, lots of players can pass a ball nicely these days – what defines De Bruyne is that throttling intensity, not just the killer pass but the killer pass at the end of a lung-busting sprint, not just the pinpoint cross but the six pinpoint passes and runs that set it up. He could score as well as create, press as well as pass. And in this respect he could scarcely have wished for a better enabler than Pep Guardiola, one of the very few men with an obsession for perfection that matched his own, these two brilliant footballing nerds just brilliantly nerding the shit out of football.
For all his individual gifts, the temptation to drown in highlight reels and pass porn, it’s also worth pointing out the halo effect a player like De Bruyne has on the players around him. The confidence to make the run, to show for the ball in tight spots, the knowledge that there is a guy 30 yards away who has made it his life’s work to make you look like a genius. Erling Haaland: “I’m not even looking at him because I know where the pass will come.” Sergio Agüero: “All I have to do is hit the ball.” Phil Foden: “You just have to run into the space and he’s going to find you.”
Perhaps a consequence of the way De Bruyne uplifted his teammates is that his own achievements feel somehow normal-sized in comparison. There is no defining De Bruyne moment, no Agüero 2012 or Yaya Touré 2014, beyond perhaps that pass against Stoke or his goal against Real Madrid in the 2023 Champions League semi-final or his four against Wolves. Arguably his greatest season came in 2019-20, when City collapsed in the league and the Ballon d’Or – in which he would certainly have run Robert Lewandowski very close – was cancelled due to Covid.
And of course, De Bruyne never really cultivated the cult of personality, chased viral fame or cultural clout. He was and remains an introvert, a family man whose friendships are few but close, whose public pronouncements are scarce but meaningful. Football is the only form of expression he ever needed, to the extent where he would refer to the two Kevins: the quiet bloke off the pitch and the “little bastard” who stepped over the line and entered it.
Of course his departure marks a tipping point in the breakup of Guardiola’s last great team. And of course questions of wealth and fairness must intrude at this point, questions of meaning and competitive balance, questions with no simple answers. But just as money sufficiently amassed can buy beauty, surely beauty sufficiently amassed can transcend money. Just as people and memories can be co-opted by power and artifice, so people and memories can breathe life and realness into the artifice, give power a beating human heart.
To hold these truths simultaneously, perhaps even to believe in them all equally, is not simply an act of maturity but an act of conscience. The same brilliance that makes football irresistible to despots makes it irresistible to us. The same qualities that render it such a potent tool of control also render it the ultimate escape. Perhaps De Bruyne’s greatest gift, on reflection, was not the ability to make us remember, but to make us forget.
