De Bruyne to Liverpool is the perfect pee-boiling transfer to start the summer

Dave Tickner
De Bruyne Man City Liverpool
Could Kevin De Bruyne leave Manchester City for Liverpool?

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but as this nonsense season skips merrily towards its assorted nonsense conclusions, we’ve decided to just lean right into that, dance around in the sh*t and simply revel in the stink.

We just want the funnest and funniest things to happen now, and if those things happen to superheat sufficient quantities of urine to power the national grid for a day or two then so much the better.

And there seems little reason to allow the end of the season to shift our thinking in this regard. The summer might as well mean more of the same.

Everyone who’s even thought about it for a second – admittedly a small number of people at this point but one that will grow exponentially as it’s forced down our throats – is already annoyed about at least one of the assorted annoying elements of the Club World Cup that FIFA has a fetch-like determination to make happen.

If you’re asking, our number one current annoyance with it is the fact it’s a very stupid tournament with some iffy team-selection criteria that nevertheless is now our only real avenue to enjoy our favourite tournament format – the 32-team, eight groups of four perfection that we are no longer allowed to have at the World Cup because we live on the cursed timeline.

So, yeah, lots to look forward to there in the early weeks of the summer. But as ever the summer means one thing. Cricket. No, not that. Or Wimbledon. It means transfers. To many people and a great many media outlets, it’s far, far more important than the tish and fipsy of football itself. Transfers are where the real business of football lies.

And transfers are absolutely as good a way as any of providing things that are fun, funny and boil all of the p*ss.

Bring them on. And may the first of those transfers please be Kevin De Bruyne joining Liverpool. This is a perfect transfer.

Sure, at the moment it exists purely in the hypothetical and actual journalists with actual Liverpool connections insist there isn’t even an offer on the table.

Don’t worry about any of that, though; we want it to happen and nobody is yet saying it definitely won’t. That’s good enough for us.

Let’s get the sincerity out of the way early doors. Some reasons we want this transfer to happen are quite selfish but also halfway wholesome. De Bruyne is a wonderful footballer to watch, and we’d very much like to continue being able to do that in the Premier League please. Selfishly, we don’t want anyone else to have him.

We’re also reasonably sure he’s still good enough to play decent Premier League football, and our suspicion is that Man City have been hasty in writing him off – as, let’s be honest, were we all – when he struggled while short of full fitness at a point in the season when City more generally were sh*tting the bed every week for an extended period of time.

He’s not as good as he was. But how good he was was ‘one of the best midfield playmakers in the world’ and we are powerfully convinced he can adapt and remain of Premier League quality even if it means a reduced or slightly altered role.

It still seems too early for him to disappear off to a Saudi or MLS semi-retirement. If he doesn’t join Liverpool or another Premier League club we do at the very least hope he stays somewhere relevant. Napoli have been mentioned a fair bit and we could absolutely live with that.

There, that’s the nice reasons out of the way. They’re real and valid, but let’s get to the real ones. The p*ss-boilers.

This is an absolute win-win move if it happens. Either De Bruyne is still really good, or he is in fact washed. Either way, one of the largest clubs in the Premier League has f*cked up and that’s rarely anything but fun.

Then there are the Liverpool specifics here.

It’s died down a bit this year because Liverpool have been obviously the best team in the country and thus getting something close to the attention that some (not all) of their fans think they deserve (i.e. all of the attention) but when that wasn’t the case there was a weird thing they had that when, say, Mo Salah did something f*cking amazing and we would all talk about it for three days, they would say things like ‘Oh, if Kevin De Bruyne did that we’d hear about it for three days’.

In terms of an oddly specific player Liverpool have oddly specific beef with as a signing, it could be matched perhaps only by Harry Kane. Which now we think about it is also not the worst idea we’ve ever heard for pretty much all the same reasons we’re so in favour of this transfer.

We also really like when a player who is so indelibly associated with one Premier League giant rocks up at another one. With De Bruyne – and Salah for that matter – we already have this because it still looks really weird when you see old pictures of them in Chelsea kits from the before times.

It still feels like cursed knowledge any time we remind ourselves that Salah was actually on the pitch for Gerrard’s Slip in 2014.

But really it’s still all the wrong way round. It’s only in retrospect that these things seem jarring; we want it to look like that when it actually happens. Like Frank Lampard scoring for City against Chelsea and genuinely not having a single clue what to do with himself.

We want those early months where even the sight of De Bruyne actually playing actual football for Liverpool that we can see with our eyes still somehow feels like a wonky photoshop on a Fabrizio Romano tweet.

One final thing to consider is the work De Bruyne will have to do to win over Liverpool fans. There’s the simple fact of the rivalry that has existed between the two clubs and De Bruyne’s key role within City generally getting the better of that rivalry, sure, but perhaps more importantly there’s also a question of ethics.

Here is a player who has given years of spectacular service to a club, winning multiple league titles and a Champions League and all manner of domestic pots and pans but who would now find himself in the position of leaving for an objectively bigger football club while denying his old one a transfer fee.

And we know Liverpool fans hate that.