Kevin De Bruyne has offered an update on his injury recovery, which suggests he may not return on schedule like Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola had said.
Maybe now we know why Pep Guardiola was so cagey when putting a timescale on Kevin De Bruyne's return from injury.
"We are now three months in and I am doing very well, everything on track," he said this week. "But they have not given me a deadline for when I will be able to play football again.” Julian Alvarez has excelled in the role behind Erling Haaland and was recently named the seventh-best player in the world at the Ballon d'Or ceremony.
It may be the case that De Bruyne doesn't return the same all-action, swashbuckling midfielder that has made him so integral to Guardiola's system. In that case, City have to find a way in his absence to make him as dangerous as possible while accepting he might not be able to do everything he could before. Or at the very least, it may take time to reach those levels again.
It may be that the best way to get De Bruyne back to his best is to continue perfecting a system without him, and then try to fit him into that system when he returns - rather than building the squad around him when he returns.
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