HERE'S a little quiz question: who assisted the first goal of Jose Mourinho’s second spell at Chelsea? The answer: Kevin De Bruyne, in one of three Premier League appearances he made for the Blues before being deemed unsuitable by his manager.
One assist in three games is not a terrible contribution (it’s basically the entire top-flight career of Lee Norfolk or Gifton Noel-Williams), but De Bruyne’s 54 assists in 133 Premier League appearances for Manchester City is better, and has elevated the Belgian into a position as perhaps the most effortlessly creative player in the competition’s history.
At Arsenal last weekend, De Bruyne initially started the game as an orthodox right winger and scored his first goal drifting in from that flank, was on the left when he played a pivotal role in Raheem Sterling’s goal, and then added another with his left foot before half-time.
De Bruyne’s game has been likened to David Beckham in his pomp but the Belgian has already scored nine Premier League goals with his left foot, three more than Beckham in roughly half the number of games. Fittingly for a modern footballer, and one operating under Pep Guardiola, De Bruyne is un-pigeonholeable, and the map of his creativity this season bears this out.
Notably, for a team drilled to reach the goal-line and pull the ball back for the likes of Sterling to pass into the net, De Bruyne has the license and ability to create high quality chances from further back. He and Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold have stylistically rebooted the whipped cross (not to be confused with the hospital Beckham was born in) and the result is that we’re all partying like it’s 1999.
More importantly, De Bruyne’s next assist will finally make him the most creative Kevin in Premier League history. His dogged pursuit of Kevin Davies has gripped the community for years and victory is in sight, with both men tied on 55.
Initially a comparison of Davies (24 headed goals) and De Bruyne (no headed goals) seems outlandish until you remember that in his early days at Chesterfield, Davies was a waspish attacker who could buzz past defenders, before being rebuilt like Anakin Skywalker as a mechanised destroyer, a man who led the Premier League for fouls conceded in seven of eight seasons between 2003-04 and 2010-11.
No the biggest dissonance is the shift from home grown Kevins to imported ones. Each of the first three Premier League seasons saw 11 Kevins take part, while there were ten Kevins, all of them UK-born, as recently as 2000–01. Yet five of the last nine Kevins to make their top-flight debut have been foreign; De Bruyne’s greatest legacy could be a new generation of young home-grown Kevins, in the Greater Manchester region at least.
This weekend the De Bruyne masterclass roadshow returns to the Etihad to take one of the two teams above them in the league, Leicester City. James Maddison has the fourth best Expected Assists figure in the Premier League this season (KDB is top, naturally) and with Brendan Rodgers being tipped this week as a successor to Guardiola, Maddison could perform the same succession role for De Bruyne.
2018-19 was largely a write-off for the Belgian and in that vacuum Maddison became one of the most creative players on the entire continent, and the first English player to create 100+ goalscoring chances for six years. He’s even able to emulate De Bruyne’s goal threat from outside the box. No two players are clones of each other, but if you spliced their DNA, the outcome would be worth £85m and be capable of 21 assists a season. Scientists: get on it.
