Why Jose Mourinho's big mistake may come back to haunt him

LIKE a scorned child, Kevin De Bruyne is on a mission to get his own back every time he steps on to a football field.

From the moment he was ushered out of the back door at Chelsea and then publicly shamed by his manager Jose Mourinho who claimed the Belgian wonderkid lacked the fight to battle for a place in his team, De Bruyne’s burners were fired.

“With De Bruyne, if you have a player knocking on your door and crying every day he wants to leave, you have to make a decision,” was Mourinho’s oft-quoted comment as he justified the decision to sell his starlet to Wolfsburg, but now that judgement could come back to haunt him.

Despite all the money spent by Manchester’s top two clubs in the summer just gone, there is a real chance that City’s £55 million signing from August 2015 will hold the balance of power in this season’s Premier League title race.

If that scenario is played out over the course of the next nine months and City end up being crowned as champions, De Brunye will have his ultimate revenge on Mourinho.

He may be quietly spoken, he may shy away from the limelight and yet spend time in the company of De Bruyne and it is evident that a burning sense of injustice lingers from his first aborted spell in English football.

Everyone at Chelsea appreciated that this was a kid with wondrous potential after he was signed from Genk in the January transfer window of 2012, but Mourinho demands more from his footballers that just raw talent.

Mourinho wants warriors who will give their all to his cause. He was leaders across the pitch who will win games on days when they are below their best. He wants his champions to win at all costs and clearly, he was not convinced De Bruyne ticked those boxes.

It may be that at the age of 23, De Bruyne was not mature enough to banish Mourinho’s doubts about his talents, yet the player who is leading the Manchester City charge now is every inch the A-list performer.

With 18 assists and to his credit, De Bruyne was the most effective creative force in the Premier League last season and he has started this campaign in ominously brilliant fashion.

Pep Guardiola’s brand of free-flowing attacking football is perfectly suited to the skill-set De Bruyne can offer and as he prepares for a week that will include a Champions League game against Shakhtar Donetsk and a Premier League clash at Chelsea, his hunger to silence his chief doubter has never bigger.

If this is to be a straight battle between City and United for the Premier League title, Guardiola v Mourinho and all that comes with it, De Bruyne has more motivation than most to make sure his side of this argument comes out on top.

“There was an opinion of what happened to me at Chelsea and, yes, I have a desire to change that opinion,” declares De Bruyne.

“Some things were said about why I left Chelsea and I clearly did not agree with these ideas, so it is satisfying to change the way people look at me in England now.

“That is one of the reasons why I was so keen to come to City when the offer was made. It felt like I needed to put things right here. I am doing that now.”

Mourinho has a reputation for ignoring players he considers to be unworthy of his attention and De Bruyne got the silence treatment from the Portuguese tactician during his final months at Chelsea.

Intriguingly, De Bruyne’s former Chelsea team-mate and compatriot Romelu Lukaku suffered a similar fate during his time working under Mourinho at Stamford Bridge, yet the wounds left by that experience did not stop him reuniting with his old boss at United this summer.

Mourinho also suggested Lukaku lacked the stomach to fight for his Chelsea career when he sold him to Everton, but thus is the method of a manager who refuses to accept he is to blame if a players fails to realise his potential under his watch.

De Bruyne even asked for Chelsea to stage open training sessions to dispel Mourinho’s theory that he was not up to the standards required to get into his team, yet his pleas fell on deaf ears despite what he believed was a strong case for his defence.

In De Bruyne’s eyes, he moved to Chelsea to be part of their first team plans and yet Mourinho saw him as a kid who was not ready to play at the highest level of the game and needed to wait his turn behind more experienced stars.

Having played four seasons as a first team regular at Genk and then during a season on loan in the German Bundesliga with Werder Bremen, De Bruyne had every right to question how long he needed to wait to prove his worth and those questions did not sit well with Mourinho.

“When you have many years playing first team football, it is hard to then be told you have to wait for a chance to show what you can do,” argues De Bruyne.

“Okay, I was a young player, but I was experienced and felt I deserved a chance to show what I could do at Chelsea. Maybe they just didn’t think I was good enough. That’s their decision.”

City’s lavish club record investment in De Bruyne now loos like value for money in the inflated transfer market and while he insists publicly he has ‘no problem with Mourinho’, you suspect his eagerness to ensure City are champions this season is fuelled by the snub served up to him by the coach now in charge at United.

“We invested a lot of money this summer, but United spent nearly the same amount on just three players but this is the way in the transfer market,” added De Bruyne.

“This is a new team, a new project. We are signing players who are young and who can be here for many years to come. That is a sign that this club are looking to have some stability.

“The trophy we all want is the Champions League. That is the most important one for any club to have and it would mean so much to City to get there.

“Of course, we want the Premier League as well and if they say we are favourites for the title, we have to deal with this. There are six favourites at the top of this league, that’s the way I see it.”

It is safe to assume all six of the managers at the top of the Premier League would relish the chance to add the finished version of De Bruyne to their line-up…and we can include Mourinho in that list.

KEVIN DE BRUYNE

Born: June 28th 1991 in Ghent, Belgium

• Started his career with KVV Drongen and joined Gent in 1999.

• Joined Chelsea in January 2012, but played just three Premier League games for the Blues before being sold to Wolfsburg for £18m in two years later.

• He won the German Cup with Wolfsburg was crowned as the Bundesliga Player of the Year before his £55m switch to Manchester City in August 2015.

• De Bruyne started his own pop-up clothing line called 'KDB' in partnership with clothing label Cult Eleven. A portion of the proceeds from the line is sent to the Special Olympics.

• He can speak fluently in English, Dutch and French.