Confession. I’m a Manchester City fan. Another confession. Kevin De Bruyne is my favourite player. In 30 years of journalism, I’ve never interviewed a City player. Don’t meet your heroes, they say. The whole thing is discombobulating. De Bruyne – one of the world’s great players – has agreed to a rare interview. But there’s a caveat. If you talk to me, he says, you also talk to my wife, my kids, you do it at our home and you get to know us all. Usually, it’s the opposite – you don’t talk to my family, you don’t come to my home, it’s all about the work rather than the private life. Strange.
We meet a few weeks before the start of the World Cup. He’s beginning to think about it. But in typical De Bruyne fashion he dispenses with diplomacy and tells it as it is. No, he’s not happy about it being in Qatar. Yes, it is a distraction from the Premier League. No, he doesn’t think Belgium have much chance of winning.
Now he’s out there hoping to prove himself wrong.
At his best on the pitch, virtually everything is channelled through him. Often he will start a move by winning the ball and running with it in the same movement. Though he plays in the centre, he sets up goals by overlapping on the wing to put in crosses of such pace, swerve and accuracy that they are impossible to defend. And while goal-scoring isn’t his main thing (he prefers to assist), last season, when he scored four goals against Wolves, commentator Alistair Mann quivered: “Kevin, stop it! I’m running out of superlatives for you!”
In 2020, De Bruyne became the first City men’s player to win the prestigious PFA Player of the Year, and won it again the following season. In September, he was named the world’s best passer in the video game Fifa 23. Earlier this month, the game Football Manager 2023 ranked him the greatest player in the world.
De Bruyne doesn’t run with the football pack. We never see him out getting into trouble. In fact, we pretty much never see him. Which makes today even stranger. But it also makes a kind of sense. “Away from football, it’s all about family,” he says. “This is my life.”
Does he think he gets paid too much? “No. I compare it to a singer at a concert and 60,000 people come. I look at it logically. There are millions of people watching the football on TV, there’s 60,000 watching the games, the income of a club is £500-£600m. Yeah, it’s a lot of money, but is it too much? If the club can afford it, it’s not too much. It’s not a popular answer, but that’s how I see it.”
How hard is it for them to relate to people struggling with the cost of living crisis? “We are really close to our family and friends, and most of them have normal jobs, so we know the struggles,” Lacroix says.
She looks at De Bruyne and asks him to translate an expression. “We stay with our feet on the ground,” he says. “It’s easier for us to understand, but it will be harder for the kids because they’re used to a certain lifestyle. They go to a private school and there are people from similar backgrounds. They understand when we go to see our families it’s different types of houses and another lifestyle.” It worries him: “We’ll try, but it cannot be the same as when we grew up. It’s not possible.”
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