Kevin De Bruyne: Manchester City see immediate return on £54m investment in player

The Belgian has five goals and four assists in nine games since returning to England from Wolfsburg

Kevin De Bruyne celebrates after his late goal against Sevilla gave Manchester City a 2-1 win on Wednesday (AP)

There is still a little of the itinerant soul about Kevin De Bruyne. He is living out of suitcases in Manchester, waiting to move on from a hotel existence and put his feet on solid ground, though he treads carefully.

This is the country which had chewed him up and spat him out, when he departed from Chelsea in that £18m move to Wolfsburg early last year, leaving him disconsolate and down on confidence having extracted only two brief conversations from manager Jose Mourinho about why he was out of contention.

That period of introspection is what makes pronouncements about him being the next big thing in English football potentially hostage to fortune.

When De Bruyne is playing and firing in the way we saw against Sevilla on Wednesday night – match-winner, man of the match – then all looks well with the world. It is when the bumps in the road arrive that the picture is less clear.

There are plenty who have observed him from close quarters at Chelsea who were suggesting in August that £54m looked a lot for a player who was not equipped with the necessary psychological mettle.

That assessment will be tested in the fullness of time, though for now we can only judge what our eyes see – and that is a player for whom the £54m outlay is already beginning to look very fine value indeed. Amid the curious pessimism among some of the City callers to BBC Radio 5, in the half-hour after City’s 2-1 win over the Spaniards, the stubborn sense remained that De Bruyne was somehow not the world-class buy that Paul Pogba of Juventus would have been.

Well, five goals and four assists in nine games for City say something quite profound and, though Sevilla are not in the bracket of the Continental elite, they worked for each other at the Etihad in a way that required something exceptional in response. The Belgian was the only one to offer that.

Manuel Pellegrini moved Kevin De Bruyne to centre-forward against Sevilla on Wednesday (Getty)

Pogba would perhaps have provided something City lacked in some of their struggles against the Spaniards: a means of repelling the counter-attacking moves Sevilla carried out with impunity, until they began to tire in the last 20 minutes and City could assert superiority. But De Bruyne also offers the versatility his manager, Manuel Pellegrini, was looking for when he shifted him to a centre-forward’s role late on Wednesday, as Wilfried Bony struggled to make an impact.

The attraction of keeping him there for Sunday’s Manchester derby, with Sergio Aguero out for a further four weeks, is clear. “It is not something that I am used to, but if he asks me to do it I will do,” De Bruyne said of Pellegrini.

He was confident enough to say that a victory for City at Old Trafford in the first Manchester derby of the season would put “pressure” on Louis van Gaal’s side. “In the end, it is just three points and if you win or lose there, it doesn’t change a lot,” he said. “But if we win there we can put a bit of pressure on them.”

It was put to De Bruyne that United may look to target him, as they seek quell his threat, to which he responded with the same boldness. “If they put maybe two people on me, then that means someone else has more space,” he said. “I think we have such a great team that on these levels it is very difficult to put two people on one guy in the very big games. If they do that someone else will be free and have more chances to do something for us.”

He wafts away every question about proving Mourinho wrong. “[I don’t feel the need to do that] at all,” he said. “I did it already in Germany. It stays the same.” But it was at this time of year in 2013 that Europe became the prism through which he viewed all his troubles.

The marginal group stage roles Mourinho gave him against Schalke (12 minutes), Basel (four minutes) and Steaua Bucharest (10 minutes) left him desperate to know why André Schürrle had so suddenly ousted him. There will have been inestimable satisfaction that he delivered so abundantly on Wednesday.