De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah are the dominant Premier League figures of the last decade – that Chelsea allowed both to leave is an emblem of their epochal waste – and De Bruyne will be walking into any Greatest Ever Premier League XI picked for the next few years at least.
Pep Guardiola has confirmed that City decided not to offer De Bruyne a new contract, and so the Belgian looks set to bound off into the sunset of some wealthy autocracy, be that Saudi Arabia or the United States of America.
De Bruyne is not as good as Lionel Messi, but he shared with him a key trait: he was the renegade individual within the Guardiola collective.
De Bruyne argues with Guardiola having been substituted in a Premier League game with Liverpool last season. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Guardiola is a Catalan separatist but his best teams have enforced a royalist’s idea of hierarchy, in the sense that there was always someone around to be served. At City, the man to be served was ironically the creator, De Bruyne. Hence De Bruyne had the freedom to break free from Pep’s rigid structure. In truth, the purpose of the structure at times was to free De Bruyne.
If there’s a signature De Bruyne image, it’s his wriggling into space to the edge of the penalty area before scything a low cross through opposition defences along a violent arc.
Some images are forgotten too, namely his rigorous pressing without the ball and his concussive running ability with the ball. De Bruyne had a Steven Gerrard-like strength at punching holes in the opposition by sheer leg strength alone.
City’s most important moment in their maiden, 100-point title win under Guardiola was the autumn win away to then-champions Chelsea, which De Bruyne won with one of these archetypal flares of raw power, bursting through midfield and slamming the ball into the net.
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Those rollicking scenes have become rare across the last couple of seasons, as De Bruyne’s running power was deadened by hamstring injuries.
De Bruyne started the 2023 Champions League final with a heavily-strapped hamstring and it was the moment at which his body said no more. The muscle snapped, De Bruyne limped off, checked in for surgery, and would go on to miss 34 games across the next two seasons with hamstring injuries alone.
“Basically, I’m a 32-year-old footballer who has been playing 15 years, made almost 700 appearances had a couple of hamstring injuries and the surgeon told me my hamstring was like a wet paper towel,” said De Bruyne after he went under the knife.
De Bruyne’s frayed and flimsy hamstrings gave the announcement that this would be his City finale an air of inevitability, but missing amid the many tributes to De Bruyne’s career and legacy across the last week was anything questioning that inevitability.
De Bruyne is 33. Should so great a player really be finished at the top level by that age?
Especially given we now live in an era of greater sport science knowledge than ever before, and De Bruyne has had the benefit of one of the best-resourced medical departments in world football.
This is not to argue City are making a mistake in cutting De Bruyne adrift – and his performances this season suggest he has perhaps even stayed a year too long – but the deeper point is worth asking.
When did the winter of some elite football careers begin arriving in their early 30s?
This was generally deemed the autumn of the careers of the previous generation. To make broad comparisons to De Bruyne’s style of play, Gerrard left Liverpool against his will at 35 while City were content to pick up Frank Lampard from Chelsea at 36.
The reality is De Bruyne has ultimately had his top level career shortened by football’s gaudily bloated calendar, which is itself a symptom of the modern game’s governing principle of greed.
Players union FIFPro this year surveyed high performance experts to determine an elite player’s maximum workload per season, with 88% of respondents saying it should not exceed 55 games per season.
De Bruyne exceeded this total three times between 2016 and 2023, with two of those occasions catching up with him the following season: having played an absurd 68 games in the 17/18 season, De Bruyne missed half of the next season with injury. It was a similar story last season, having played 57 games in the treble-winning, 22/23 season.
There is a single equation at work in the sport at the moment.
More games = more money. QED.
But as clubs, leagues, Uefa and Fifa have spent the last few years voraciously grabbing cash wherever it can be found, there has been little regard for greed’s consequences, and Kevin De Bruyne’s shorn hamstrings are a small but evocative instance of the attendant player burnout.
So in return for all of these new competitions and expanded formats and The Constantly Happening Football, supporters are paying more for their match tickets and their TV subscriptions, while ultimately getting less of a true great like De Bruyne on the biggest stage and in the games that matter most.
Everything, in other words, is getting worse.
Thanks for the memories, Kevin. We’ve been robbed of a few more.
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De Bruyne's Man City exit should not have been inevitable - football's greed shortened his career
FAREWELL THEN, KEVIN de Bruyne.
De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah are the dominant Premier League figures of the last decade – that Chelsea allowed both to leave is an emblem of their epochal waste – and De Bruyne will be walking into any Greatest Ever Premier League XI picked for the next few years at least.
Pep Guardiola has confirmed that City decided not to offer De Bruyne a new contract, and so the Belgian looks set to bound off into the sunset of some wealthy autocracy, be that Saudi Arabia or the United States of America.
De Bruyne is not as good as Lionel Messi, but he shared with him a key trait: he was the renegade individual within the Guardiola collective.
Guardiola is a Catalan separatist but his best teams have enforced a royalist’s idea of hierarchy, in the sense that there was always someone around to be served. At City, the man to be served was ironically the creator, De Bruyne. Hence De Bruyne had the freedom to break free from Pep’s rigid structure. In truth, the purpose of the structure at times was to free De Bruyne.
If there’s a signature De Bruyne image, it’s his wriggling into space to the edge of the penalty area before scything a low cross through opposition defences along a violent arc.
Some images are forgotten too, namely his rigorous pressing without the ball and his concussive running ability with the ball. De Bruyne had a Steven Gerrard-like strength at punching holes in the opposition by sheer leg strength alone.
City’s most important moment in their maiden, 100-point title win under Guardiola was the autumn win away to then-champions Chelsea, which De Bruyne won with one of these archetypal flares of raw power, bursting through midfield and slamming the ball into the net.
Those rollicking scenes have become rare across the last couple of seasons, as De Bruyne’s running power was deadened by hamstring injuries.
De Bruyne started the 2023 Champions League final with a heavily-strapped hamstring and it was the moment at which his body said no more. The muscle snapped, De Bruyne limped off, checked in for surgery, and would go on to miss 34 games across the next two seasons with hamstring injuries alone.
“Basically, I’m a 32-year-old footballer who has been playing 15 years, made almost 700 appearances had a couple of hamstring injuries and the surgeon told me my hamstring was like a wet paper towel,” said De Bruyne after he went under the knife.
De Bruyne’s frayed and flimsy hamstrings gave the announcement that this would be his City finale an air of inevitability, but missing amid the many tributes to De Bruyne’s career and legacy across the last week was anything questioning that inevitability.
De Bruyne is 33. Should so great a player really be finished at the top level by that age?
Especially given we now live in an era of greater sport science knowledge than ever before, and De Bruyne has had the benefit of one of the best-resourced medical departments in world football.
This is not to argue City are making a mistake in cutting De Bruyne adrift – and his performances this season suggest he has perhaps even stayed a year too long – but the deeper point is worth asking.
When did the winter of some elite football careers begin arriving in their early 30s?
This was generally deemed the autumn of the careers of the previous generation. To make broad comparisons to De Bruyne’s style of play, Gerrard left Liverpool against his will at 35 while City were content to pick up Frank Lampard from Chelsea at 36.
The reality is De Bruyne has ultimately had his top level career shortened by football’s gaudily bloated calendar, which is itself a symptom of the modern game’s governing principle of greed.
Players union FIFPro this year surveyed high performance experts to determine an elite player’s maximum workload per season, with 88% of respondents saying it should not exceed 55 games per season.
De Bruyne exceeded this total three times between 2016 and 2023, with two of those occasions catching up with him the following season: having played an absurd 68 games in the 17/18 season, De Bruyne missed half of the next season with injury. It was a similar story last season, having played 57 games in the treble-winning, 22/23 season.
There is a single equation at work in the sport at the moment.
More games = more money. QED.
But as clubs, leagues, Uefa and Fifa have spent the last few years voraciously grabbing cash wherever it can be found, there has been little regard for greed’s consequences, and Kevin De Bruyne’s shorn hamstrings are a small but evocative instance of the attendant player burnout.
So in return for all of these new competitions and expanded formats and The Constantly Happening Football, supporters are paying more for their match tickets and their TV subscriptions, while ultimately getting less of a true great like De Bruyne on the biggest stage and in the games that matter most.
Everything, in other words, is getting worse.
Thanks for the memories, Kevin. We’ve been robbed of a few more.
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column Kevin De Bruyne machester city Premier League