Right now, Kevin de Bruyne is one of the biggest stars on the soccer planet. Guardiola’s Manchester City leader and co-leader, together with Lukaku, of a Belgium that chooses everything In this Eurocup, the midfielder even appears as one of the top candidates to win the Ballon d’Or this season. However, Before his emergence at Wolfsburg, it was another English team that noticed his talent: Chelsea. But Stamford Bridge left in 2014 due to the lack of timing in exchange for 22 million. City signed him for 77 in 2015 and that transfer to the German team has always been placed in José Mourinho’s debit, technical blue by then.
The Portuguese is not the first to express himself on the subject, but from his role as commentator of the Eurocup for talkSPORT wanted to clarify again what happened. “Kevin is an incredible player, at this moment he is one of the best players in the world, there is no doubt about that. My story with Kevin was fun And, in the end, it has done very well, of course. I arrived in my second stage at Chelsea and we went to Asia to play some games and train (preseason). Kevin was supposed to come with us and after the tour he would go on loan, “he contextualizes. Mou.
“I was so impressed that I made the decision, ‘I don’t want this boy to go on loan, I want him to stay’, and in our first game of the Premier League season he started Against Hull City, in the second game we go to Old Trafford (did not play). After this, he came up to me and said: ‘I want to play every game, I want to play every minute’ and the guy who was supposed to go on loan wasn’t even happy to stay and grow up there, “he continued.
“‘I want to play every game, I want to play every minute”
Kevin de Bruyne, to Mourinho, in 2014
“So he pushed hard to leave, he wanted to go to Germany, where he had previously been on loan (at Werder Bremen) and wanted to develop in the Bundesliga, and his decision was to leave. He put a lot of pressure on that and it went really well. In the end, Chelsea sold him and the story is there, “the now Roma coach justifies himself, adding that De Bruyne” was not an easy child, in the sense that it was not easy to communicate with him, he was very clear about it. and it was very difficult to make him change[his mind].
“He was not an easy kid”
Mourinho, on De Bruyne
“He was not prepared for that, he was coming from a season in Germany where he played basically every minute of every game. Sometimes we coaches make mistakes and don’t consider that a player has the potential to do this in the future, but that was not the case for Kevin.. I saw that he had the potential to do it, but he was just a kid with a very clear mind. He knew exactly what he wanted, “he concluded.