Brains and the ambition to win more than just a salary hike. Thank God for De Bruyne

THERE are plenty of reasons why I am going to vote for Kevin De Bruyne as my Footballer of the Year, even though he missed a part of the season through injury, even though there are still several weeks left until the vote has to be cast. One of those reasons, maybe even the first among equals, unfolded in front of us at the King Power Stadium last weekend.

Manchester City were already a goal up when De Bruyne controlled the ball just inside the Leicester half and jinked to the right to throw off the attentions of his marker. There was still a cloak of defenders in front of him, looking as if they were shielding every possible danger but De Bruyne sees things that others cannot see.

What happened next was the best moment of the season so far. De Bruyne played a slide- rule pass down an invisible line that took out half the Leicester team. Jonny Evans lunged at it to try to make an interception but it eluded him. Wesley Fofana threw himself at it but it eluded him, too. That pass beat all of them and ran on into the path of Gabriel Jesus, through on goal and, after a brief diversion, City were 2-0 up and the match was over.

It was beautiful. It was like ballet on grass. It was one of those moments where you sit back and marvel at the pictures that football can paint and the way that it can illustrate a player’s vision and anticipation of movement. We talk often about a player’s ‘ football brain’ and there are few in our league or any other who have the football brain of De Bruyne.

And De Bruyne does stuff like this almost every week. Sometimes twice a week. He was at it again in City’s Champions League victory over Borussia Dortmund, rivalling Real Madrid’s Toni Kroos for the pass of the quarter-finals with an arrow of a left-footed ball that flew like a bullet to Ilkay Gundogan, with that flat trajectory that De Bruyne has perfected, and created City’s last-minute winner.

If all that were not enough, it was then announced on Wednesday that De Bruyne had signed a new deal which will keep him at City until 2025 and which will make him the best paid player in the Premier League. When it emerged that he had negotiated the deal himself, without an agent, it won him almost as much admiration as one of those defence-splitting passes.

It is worth pointing out that there are a lot of good agents in football, decent, honourable people who work hard for their clients, who care about more than just a fast buck, who do not exist just to negotiate a transfer. It is also worth pointing out that there are a lot of unscrupulous people in football clubs who would like to pay players less than they deserve.

But the work of those agents is too easily overshadowed by the rapacious activities of men like Mino Raiola, who was said to have been paid £40 million for his part in Paul Pogba’s move from Juventus to Manchester United in 2016 and appears to have spent much of the time since suggesting that the Frenchman wants to get away and play for somebody else.

Now Raiola i s busy hawking Erling Haaland around Europe’s richest clubs even though the player is in the midst of a contract with Dortmund. At a time when many football clubs are struggling for their very existence because of the pandemic, and when figures show that Premier League clubs shelled out more than £272m in fees to agents over the course of 12 months to February this year, people see men like Raiola as symbols of a game gone mad.

It is the apparent impotence of clubs to curb the power of the less upstanding agents that is so galling, too. Although City and Manchester United have become reluctant to deal with Raiola, many clubs remain complicit. That is why De Bruyne’s decision to negotiate his own deal, with the help of his father, is such an emotive subject. Fans see too much money bleeding out of the game and passed on to them in the price of their season tickets and their merchandise.

De Bruyne is not alone in what he did. Gary Neville did not have an agent when he played. He and his brother, Phil, took their dad, Neville Neville, into meetings with then chief executive David Gill when they played for United. It is also being reported that Raheem Sterling will represent himself in talks over a new contract with City at the end of the season.

De Bruyne also made it plain in his contract negotiations that he wanted to be satisfied City would do everything in their power to give him the platform to win the Champions League. Perhaps that seems like an obvious request but it was still refreshing to see it assume as much prominence in the player’s thinking as his wages.

In the face of their failings in the competition, there is a danger that City have started to feign indifference towards the Champions League but the truth is that winning it remains the final hurdle they need to jump in order to be recognised as part of Europe’s elite, a club that belongs at the top table. With players like De Bruyne committing their future to the team, it feels as if they already have one hand on the prize.