Kevin, the creator: Analysing the four distinct eras of De Bruyne’s time with Manchester City

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Kevin De Bruyne is leaving Manchester City. It is a sad reality that many supporters are yet to come to terms with — in fact, many have been wondering and hoping whether the club’s decision-makers may yet change their mind and offer him a new contract to replace the one that expires next month after all.

After a touching goodbye at the Etihad Stadium following the game against Bournemouth on Tuesday, De Bruyne will — most likely — kick a ball in City colours for the last time in their season finale away to Fulham on Sunday.

The Belgium international, who turns 34 in June, has been one of the finest players of the Premier League era, not only helping City win the title six times but lighting up the division with his assists, goals and all-action approach.

Over the years, he constantly developed as a player, including a now-forgotten adjustment period to what was then known as a ‘deeper role’, the emergence of his trademark back-post crosses, a spell up front and setting up the Erling Haaland supply line.

In celebration of his sparkling decade with City, The Athletic dives into the four notably different eras of his time in Manchester.

(Stu Forster/Getty Images)

The early days — 2015-17

It is easy to forget, nearly 10 years on, that De Bruyne spent much of his first season at City playing as a right-winger.

In fairness, he also spent a lot of it on the left… and a lot of it in the middle, too.

De Bruyne arrived from Germany’s Wolfsburg as a very versatile player — something that has been on display throughout his time at the club, but it was in those very early days under Manuel Pellegrini’s management when he was asked to play in so many different positions so often.

Pellegrini described him as “in all senses the perfect player to arrive to our team”, due to his creativity and goal threat after De Bruyne had scored a late Champions League winner against Sevilla on one of City’s more memorable nights from that season. Having started on the left wing, he was moved up front — and scored that goal playing from the right.

De Bruyne scores with his left foot against Sevilla in 2015 (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

No matter which side he played, though, the one constant was that he would always operate in the attacking third — to the extent that the main talking point around De Bruyne when Pep Guardiola took over as manager the following summer was him having to adapt to playing deeper.

“It’s a different role,” De Bruyne told Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws at the very start of Guardiola’s reign. “It’s alright. It’s a little change, but it’s alright. The coach has his own tactics. I play not as a No 10 but as a free No 8, with a lot of movement everywhere.”

He, and David Silva, were asked to perform as more box-to-box midfielders rather than the previous No 10 roles that allowed them to stay high up the pitch.

Guardiola and his coaching staff noticed a dip in De Bruyne’s output while he adjusted to these new orders, partly due to the extra amount of running he was having to do, around the midpoint of that 2016-17 season. That said, he still got 18 Premier League assists, including a remarkable crossfield pass to Raheem Sterling against Arsenal, which he played despite not once looking at his target:

Guardiola and his staff were always convinced that De Bruyne and Silva were the perfect men to do the job, and they also surprised their new manager — he did not expect them to play forward quite so quickly and effectively. Against teams who did not sit deep, this was something that Guardiola really liked.

A De Bruyne-Silva partnership ahead of a holding midfielder became part of the blueprint for City’s success, and across the Premier League these days it is common to see two “free eights” in that kind of set-up, but a bit of historical context is important here.

“Guardiola’s Manchester City will win the Premier League with a three-man midfield featuring a box-to-box player and two natural No 10s, something no one would have dreamt of before his arrival in England,” Michael Cox, now of The Athletic, wrote for ESPN in February 2018, citing the English national team’s failure to pair Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard as just one example.

If you had to identify De Bruyne’s best position, it would unquestionably be as the right-sided attacking midfielder — and yet it was something he had to adapt to during Guardiola’s first season.

(Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

The golden years — 2018-20

This was, of course, the period when City really took off. For many of their supporters, the 2017-18 team remains the best, most attractive version of all Guardiola’s City sides and indeed the style and approach that many would like to see them revert to — presumably something they would do had the Premier League not changed fundamentally since then.

But that is another story.

“He played in a holding midfield position against Chelsea,” Guardiola said of De Bruyne at the start of that season. “He can play in four, five, six positions.”

Versatility was definitely the main De Bruyne talking point as 2017-18 got rolling. “I am used to playing in six different positions in my career, so that’s not an issue for me,” he said at the time, in his typically phlegmatic way. “I have always changed positions and I don’t expect any different. It’s all the same to me. It’s all about the way you interpret it.”

(Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

Nevertheless, this was when De Bruyne really began to make that central, box-to-box role his own, and with runs in-behind from Sterling, Leroy Sane, Sergio Aguero and Gabriel Jesus, he was able to use his passing range to its full extent.

If his 2017-18 season could be boiled down to a single moment, it would probably be the long-distance, crown-green-bowls-like through ball to Sane against Stoke City, which had enough speed to evade four opponents but slowed down enough for his team-mate to run onto perfectly.

He missed a lot of the next season through injury but played a part in City’s perfect 14-match run-in, perhaps most memorably with a slide-rule assist for Sterling to open the scoring in a truly vital fixture at Crystal Palace in the middle of April.

It was also the time when he started to perfect the now-famous back-post cross from the right-hand corner of the box. Although their heroics eventually came up short in the tie, City beat Tottenham 4-3 in a thrillingly dramatic Champions League quarter-final second leg, in which De Bruyne notched three assists — one of them a perfect example of the type of cross that set up so many City goals for the next year or so.

The exact specifics could change from game to game but the two main ideas were to get De Bruyne to the byline by underlapping or overlapping, like in the Spurs example above, or to manufacture a situation where somebody else got the ball on the right wing, attracted players to them, and set it back for De Bruyne, who would invariably be in enough space to cross — like this one from the FA Cup semi-final against Brighton, 11 days before that Tottenham epic.

Despite 2019-20 being known, at least until this one came along, as City’s off season, it was probably De Bruyne’s best as an individual, and his far-post crossing really thrived.

This was the year when he equalled Thierry Henry’s long-standing record of 20 league assists, and while De Bruyne is annoyed to this day that the Premier League took a 21st off him (yet later included it in its own video celebrating his 100th in the competition), the fact Mohamed Salah of Liverpool has become the latest player to be on course to comfortably match, at least, their shared milestone, only to fall short in this season’s final two months, it does highlight how well De Bruyne did to rack up so many.

He also hit one of his best ever goals during that season — a thunderous effort away to Newcastle. It is worth watching if only to hear the collective intake of breath among the St James’ Park crowd as the ball cannons off the underside of the crossbar.

Stepping up — 2020-22

If the far-post crosses now suddenly dried up, it’s no coincidence. In trying to get out of their 2019-20 slump, City eventually stumbled upon a system that utilised a false nine — initially Jesus dropping off the forward line but soon using a revolving cast of midfielders in that role instead.

De Bruyne did a stint as the false nine himself, although during the 2020-21 pandemic-lockdown season there were times when he moved back to the left side. With City’s forward dropping deep and the wingers now tasked with cutting inside, rather than running in behind, like the old days, the opportunities to play through balls fell away.

De Bruyne actually did the bulk of his creative work at the start of that campaign, when things looked not much better for City than the one beforehand. With Guardiola playing more cautiously than ever to try to make his team more stable (sound familiar?), it seemed that only Joao Cancelo, Riyad Mahrez and De Bruyne were given licence to create — the sort of role that the latter obviously relished.

A run of nine assists in 12 league games from October to January kept City afloat while they found their feet, and it was that sort of contribution that helped him land a massive new contract. De Bruyne drafted in data experts to highlight his importance to the team, which helped him fight his corner after being offered terms that would have earned him less over the course of the mooted deal (the one that is expiring this summer) than his previous agreement.

(Peter Powell – Pool/Getty Images)

In the end, he secured a significant pay rise, partly because of data which highlighted, among other things, that City were a certain percentage less likely to win the Champions League were he to leave, while their rivals would be more likely to win it if he were to join them.

They actually reached the competition’s final that season, with De Bruyne playing and scoring from a false nine position during some of their knockout-phase matches, but were beaten there by Chelsea — in a game where De Bruyne went off injured on the hour after a nasty collision with opposition defender Antonio Rudiger.

City tried but failed to sign Harry Kane from Spurs that summer, meaning the false-nine approach stuck around for one more season, requiring all of their attackers to chip in with goals. No surprise, then, that 2021-22 was the first and only one of De Bruyne’s 10 seasons at City where he scored more league goals than he assisted, and indeed he finished as their top scorer in the Premier League.

He scored inside the first five minutes against Manchester United, Liverpool and Real Madrid at a time when City showed a real ruthless streak, and hit four — including the first three with his left foot — against Wolves on the day in May when it came to light that another of the world’s elite striker, Erling Haaland, would be joining them for the next season.

It was probably not a coincidence, then, that De Bruyne celebrated that evening at Molineux with a standing-up version of Haaland’s yoga pose.

(Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)

The Haaland years — 2022-25

If goals were more necessary than assists from him for a year or so, then De Bruyne’s normal creative service for City was resumed when Haaland signed.

“This pass is maybe the best I ever got, because I only had to run around the ball and put it in the back of the net,” the striker said of a De Bruyne through ball on his Premier League debut against West Ham in August 2022. “I didn’t have to do anything. The pace is just perfect.”

(Stu Forster/Getty Images)

De Bruyne did not see it quite the same way when he was asked about it in a separate interview.

“It’s actually not really difficult, you know. It’s true. You find the space and you put it into the space behind and he runs onto it.”

Through balls have been back on the agenda since Haaland came to town, and De Bruyne has been able to dust off his old far-post crosses, too.

If one game summed up the De Bruyne-Haaland supply line, it would be the 6-2 FA Cup tie away to Luton last season, where he set the Norwegian up to score four of the goals. The game plan was essentially set up for that partnership to thrive: goalkeeper Stefan Ortega played the ball up to Haaland, he knocked it down for De Bruyne and then spun in behind, allowing the Belgian to pick him out.

De Bruyne has set up 20 of Haaland’s 120 City goals, over 16 per cent, and 12 of his 84 in the Premier League, which is over 14 per cent.

Those rates may not sound quite as high as you might expect but remember De Bruyne missed half of last season and also much of this one through injury. After he returned in January last year, he registered 10 assists, enough to finish joint-third in the entire league, despite playing in only 18 of City’s 38 top-flight matches.

“Kevin De Bruyne is warming up and the whole country is shaking,” then Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said ahead of that much anticipated return: a couple of days earlier, he had trotted down the touchline to do some stretching during a largely sleepy 2-0 home win against Sheffield United, and the sight of him generated more excitement than most of the on-pitch action.

De Bruyne then missed around two months of this season in the autumn and endured problems for several more weeks after he returned, which presumably would have been one factor in City’s decision not to renew his contract.

It is a development that De Bruyne is patently not happy about but, true to his word, he has continued to give his all for City on the pitch: he helped turn last month’s home league game against Palace on its head, sparking City into life at two goals down and inspiring a 5-2 comeback win. He put the team on his shoulders that afternoon in the way that he has done consistently for the past decade, which is something that is not going to be easy to replace.

He then scored the goal that beat Wolves and although he faded when City and Palace met again in the FA Cup final, he created two clear-cut chances. Even in what has undoubtedly been his most difficult season by far, he still has the most ‘shot-creating actions’ per 90 minutes in the 2024-25 Premier League.

Yet as much as the numbers have always been a fine accompaniment to De Bruyne’s contribution, what will really stay in the memory is the way he went about his work with a mixture of artistry and sheer destruction.

Players like Kevin De Bruyne do not come around too often.

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

This news was originally published on this post .

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