Jose Mourinho is often painted as the guy who caused then 23-year old Kevin de Bruyne to leave Chelsea. This accusation is unfair because it is so over-simplified.
The general consensus is that Jose Mourinho was not patient enough with Kevin De Bruyne and did not give him opportunities to progress at Chelsea. Some even go further and say Mourinho did not have the foresight to recognize that de Bruyne would become the world-class player he is right now.
Mourinho certainly was not popular for his approach towards trusting younger players. However, it is important to put Mourinho’s situation into perspective. Many factors contribute to decisions over which players coaches keep and which players they let go.
Jose Mourinho played a very physical and technical game, and therefore judged players based on those criteria. He is a results-oriented manager. He wanted to build a winning team, as he had before and as he ultimately did again at Chelsea. Giving opportunities to youth players was not his priority, neither was it what he was hired for. He was hired to win, he had a winning team and he had no reason to change it unnecessarily.
Despite the conventional thought that De Bruyne was not given “opportunities,” he did, in fact, have them. That shifts the argument to whether Mourinho gave him “enough” opportunities, and if those opportunities were enough to become regular playing time.
Here we can say, no, Mourinho didn’t, because he had no reason to nor could he afford to.
Kevin de Bruyne has turned out to be technical genius. His skillset is one that he needs to hone over long periods of time, and the full extent of the talent may not reveal itself until deep into that development process.
You don’t become an expert passer of the ball if you’ve not had minutes at the top level. A lot of minutes. De Bruyne needed these minutes, but he could not get them at Chelsea, which is why he was sent on loan to Werder Bremen. He was going to be sent on loan again, but he did not want another, so Chelsea sold him to Wolfsburg for £18 million. He played so well during that season that Manchester City bought him for £58 million, making him the second most expensive player in the Premier League at the time. De Bruyne had become a fine player indeed.
How did he become such an excellent player? Game time. Minutes. De Bruyne made 34 appearances for Werder Bremen and 73 appearances for Wolfsburg. For Chelsea? He made nine appearances. Nine.
The difference in minutes represents the reason players are sent on loan. Had De Bruyne not done himself justice when he went on loan, he would have not attracted interest from Wolfsburg. What De Bruyne found at Werder Bremen was an environment from which he could ply his trade with the pressure that comes with playing at top level. There he had enough time to make all the mistakes he needed to make and learn what he needed to learn. He would not have had any of that at Chelsea, and therefore would not have become the player he has become.
Jose Mourinho could only give minutes to so many midfielders. De Bruyne had no reason to be in the regular XI and Mourinho only had cup minutes to give to him. He needed more than that.
Many people were not impressed with Mourinho’s disinterest in integrating youth, and might go further to argue that De Bruyne should have been starting in the Premier League ahead of those who were starting. However, that is not the point. It is unrealistic to hold against Mourinho his decision to not give first team minutes to a player who had not made his way into the first team XI.
From a simple development perspective, regardless of what’s become of him since, De Bruyne needed to be starting games at the top level – regularly and anywhere.
The contemporary judgments against Mourinho’s decision to let De Bruyne go are based entirely on hindsight.
No one said much at the time because De Bruyne did not give any reason for fans to rally around him. In the nine games that De Bruyne started for Chelsea, he didn’t light up the world. It would have been unnecessary and foolish to start him continually ahead of better players for the sake of “giving opportunities.”
Potentially world-class players are not world-class players until they become world-class players. Some are so good at early ages that their place in the senior team is never a matter of dispute, so obvious is their talent and immediate contributions to the team. These are players like Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Yet even these players are helped by regular playing time. Most of the time, world-class talents need a platform where they can get as many playing minutes at as high a level as possible.
Chelsea fans understandably feel hurt when they see the De Bruyne of today and think “He could’ve been ours. He WAS ours.”
But had he stayed ours, this De Bruyne that the world sees today would not have been ours.
The De Bruyne that left Chelsea was raw, under-developed and budding. The De Bruyne that joined Manchester City is refined, developed and excellent.
The steps in between are the De Bruyne of Werder Bremen and Wolfsburg. Without the opportunities those clubs provided, well in excess of what Chelsea had immediately on offer, De Bruyne would have ended up in a different place.
Let’s also consider one other possibility: Mourinho may have seen the seeds of De Bruyne’s talent and known that De Bruyne would someday be world-class. Mourinho may have wanted De Bruyne to stay and gradually, over many more years, accumulate the necessary experience. Assuring De Bruyne that he would start in the cups would mean asking him to be a fringe player for 1-2 years. That would be Mourinho balancing the immediate demands of the club with De Bruyne’s development.
But De Bruyne may not have wanted to. Not every player would go along with that plan, and it is not fair to expect them to.
In the final tally, Jose Mourinho helped Kevin De Bruyne by letting him go someplace where he could play the necessary number of minutes to hone his skill set. If Mourinho knew that De Bruyne would become world class, he set De Bruyne on the only path that would have achieved it in the timeframe in which he has.