This Video Will Change The Way You See DE BRUYNE Forever

So listen to this, that point is the average premier league midfielder, almost every player is somewhere around that dot and just at the edge of what can still be considered normal, you have the top players, but then there's an even smaller group, the outliers, I like to call this the elite zone, even the best in the business will only reach it once or twice in their careers but there is one player who not only surpasses it, he lives above it, and once in a while, almost as if to mock the mere mortals below him, it takes it all another step further, a step that, according to all the simulations I ran, puts him at a level well beyond what any other player could reach even if they had a hundred lifetimes to pursue it. In other words, I think I have mathematically proven that Kevin De Bruyne is superhuman, that to even compare anyone else to him at his peak would be disrespectful, however, that's exactly what Man City did. In 2020, Man City told De Bruyne they would not renew his contract unless he agreed to a wage cut, it sounds like pure insanity but it's simple, he was about to turn 30, had already spent 300 days injured just over those first 5 seasons and the word on the street was that Messi was about to leave Barcelona. Now, De Bruyne is likely the only person on earth who truly realizes how good De Bruyne is, but he was never the kind to bang his fist on the table and demand respect, so instead of losing his temper, he decided to show them. At that first meeting, De Bruyne had not even brought an agent, and after it was done, he didn't go looking for one either, instead, he hired a team of data analysts. De Bruyne got them to run thousands of simulations calculating the impact of every touch of every player in the top 5 leagues, and the result was clear, if you could pick any player out of any team and drop him into your starting 11, the one who would improve your chances of winning any given match the most, was Kevin De Bruyne. Man City had one ultimate goal, the Champions League, and now, not only had it been shown to them that if any player was capable of getting them there, it was De Bruyne, but it was explicitly shown to them that if they were to let him go, one of the teams challenging them for that trophy would immediately jump on a chance to exploit that cheat code. In other words, they were shown that there may be players more flashy, but there is a reason a young De Bruyne was dubbed the modern Cruyff. As the great man said it himself, playing football is simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is. A couple days later, not only had Man City gone back on their word regarding the wage cut, and even apologized, they had offered De Bruyne a raise. He had just become the first player to successfully use data analysis to negotiate a contract, but now, the question remains, what do those grabs even look like? Well, from the few details that were leaked, it looked something like this. Yeah, it's a lot, but listen. First, forget old school stats like assists, they depend more on who finishes the chance than who creates it, so instead, we're gonna use expected assists per 90. Think of it like this, it's the total danger created by a player's passes over match on average. This way, if you put in a killer pass and the striker fumbles it, it doesn't matter. Still, that doesn't tell the whole story, two players could accumulate expected assists in completely different ways, maybe one creates a few elite chances and another a lot of just decent ones. So, on the other axis is key passes per 90. Now we can also know how often a player tries to create those chances. For example, you can see exactly why it was that in the 2019-20 season, Aston Villa fans were fighting, with half claiming Connor Houran had a wand of a left foot and the other half claiming he barely got involved in the game, they were both right. He could put in dangerous passes like no one else in my 9 year data set, however, it did not seem to go for them very often. Which brings us precisely to one core principle, most players are forced to trade, when the volume goes up, the quality goes down. Look at Bruno, he has never put in as many passes as he's been putting in this season, in the past, at times, even with fewer attempts, it could create more danger. So, what about the Bruina? Well, though it almost feels wrong to separate the two, the Bruina arrived before Guardiola. Signed by Manuel Pellegrini, thanks to some funky exchange rates, depending on currency, you could actually argue that it was the Premier League's all time record signing and it's no wonder. Having closed out his final season at Wolfsburg with 20 assists, at the time a record in the top 5 leagues, it feels almost laughable that the media tried to label him as just a Chelsea reject because even on his debut season, he hit all time highs, for both metrics. Let me remind you, Mourinho had this guy man marking fullbacks. And yeah, sure, you could argue his numbers would be a bit inflated since back then, he sometimes played as a winger, so fine, let's include every midfielder who also played on the wing and even every winger who ever put a shift in midfield and it doesn't matter, KDB still tops it, no adaptation period needed. And then Guardiola arrived. As the legend goes, the first time they ever spoke, Pep told the Bruina, listen, you can be easily a top 5 player on the planet. But really, back then, he still wasn't sure where exactly to play him and it was only 3 months later, while watching him play a friendly for Belgium, that he realized it was right in front of him the whole time. 2 days later, he sat down the Bruina and David Silva and told them that he'd be playing as what he called free number 8, not really a 10, not even really an 8, but 2 synchronized playmakers exploiting the half spaces. And the result was phenomenal. Even while playing deeper, supposedly getting fewer opportunities, not only did he pull them out of thin air, but he also made sure he never missed. And his numbers shot through the roof once again. So much so, that he completely defeated the trend of the graph, managing to steal the title of biggest outlier from Connor Hooran while still racking up the second most chances out of anyone in it. In other words, that was the year he proved to Pep that he really was a cheat code, a player who could create him under any circumstances and the next season, Pep abused it so much, it nearly broke the league. Looking at the graph, 17-18 might look like the Bruina's worst season, however, that is incredibly deceptive. Because what Pep did that year may not be exactly what you'd expect, he didn't just plug the Bruina back into that free 8 role and give it a second go, no, instead, he finally made it so that their entire game flowed through the Bruina and yes, that came with extra responsibilities, but even then, his worst playmaking numbers were still better than anyone else's best and everywhere else on the pitch, they exploded. Across the whole league, no pyramid fielder put up more tackles in the final third, no one carried the ball up the pitch more and only one hit more shots on target, the Bruina was everywhere, so by the end, he hadn't just won his first premier league title, he had led Man City to an all time record 100 point tally, it was the engine behind the greatest league campaign England had ever seen, but unfortunately, it was also right there that you would see why City would deem him an injury risk. By September, just 3 days after the league's opening game, the Bruina injured his right knee and was sidelined for 2 months, then he came back, made 2 starts and injured his other knee going out for another month and a half, by March, it was his tie that put him in the infirmary room for a month and in April, it was his hamstring, 166 days out in a single season, not even a thousand minutes played in the premier league and only 1 goal in 2 assists, Man City had swooped all 4 domestic trophies without him and were now rightfully questioning whether they could rely on him, not because of how good he was, but because of how often he wasn't there. However, the next season would only make that more confusing as it was the kind of statistical anomaly the premier league had never seen before. Up till this point, the Bruina had always been a step ahead of the best of the best, it was shocking but it wasn't inconceivable. Now, the same cannot be said about the 2019-20 season, take everything I said about the previous years, merge it all into one, then double it, that's how good it was. For some perspective, the Bruina was as far from peak David Silva as David Silva was from the average midfielder. It is such an outrageous overperformance that it reaches the limits of this crap's capabilities, after all, without anyone remotely close to him, how can we know how extreme of an overperformance this was? Well, that is why I plotted the distribution, because now we can calculate how likely it is for a season like that to happen again. You see, at the center is almost every player, some better, some worse, but the majority will never stray too far. Then the first outlier appears, it's David Silva twice, so I ran the simulations and you should see numbers like those about once every three seasons. Then there's Bruno Fernandes and Conor Hurrian, the only two players who ever outdid the Bruina's worst season and you should expect performances like those about once every 4 to 80 years. But the further you go to the right, it gets more and more unlikely, faster and faster, so much so that once you get near the absurdity of 2019-2020, according to this simulation, you'd need to wait for 1268 years for something like that to happen again. Now, you may say that something has to be wrong, that there were other greats before him and that's what makes this even more interesting. These simulations can only run on the data that is available, and obviously advanced statistics like expected assists are either unavailable or hard to come by for older seasons, so what you're looking at is every Premier League midfielder since 2017 stuck in a simulation playing over and over again until one of them can reach the level of the Bruina in the 19-20 season. And it still takes over 4000 years, so I expanded it, took every midfielder from the top 5 leagues and suddenly it's 2740 players instead of just 567 and no matter how unfair that is on the Bruina, you know what? It doesn't matter. Sure, James Rodriguez and Thomas Muller went farther than any Premier League player ever had, but they were still miles away from the Bruina. I even ran the simulation again and even with five times more players in it, a lot of them playing in much easier leagues, it still took 387 years before one touched the Bruina's level. So, you know what? I ignored all sanity, dumped every single player into the dataset regardless of position, but even with 12678 players, 22 times more than what I started on, only a single one was able to outdo 19-20 the Bruina. And it was 19-20 Di Maria, who played virtually every single game as a winger for by far the best team in the worst league out of the top 5 and get this, set out almost half of the season. Yet, as always, it doesn't matter. Because remember, we're still only factoring in the Bruina up till 2020, there was still a lot more to come. Even aside from those contract negotiations, 2020 was a disappointing year for the Bruina in many other ways. Individually, it was unstoppable. He won his first PFA player of the year award, he matched on his all time assist record, yet not only did he still come out of there with only a league cup, but the affable way he handed the award to Jordan Henderson and even matching the assist record felt bittersweet after the league refused to award him an assist so clear, they themselves would put it into the Bruina's highlights reel. Then, the next season, David Silva left, Aguero vanished and the Bruina himself got sidelined over and over again, even coming out injured in a champions league final they would go on to lose. You could easily fall for the mistake of assuming Man City had been right to worry all along, but instead, not only did the Bruina manage to keep up his numbers, he became the 3rd ever player to take the PFA's player of the year award 2 seasons in a row, even while playing without a proper striker, with Gundogan and the Bruina himself having to put in shifts as false nines, so much so that in those infamous contract negotiations his number one demand was that they finally pull the trigger and sign a new striker, but City did not. With the whole hurricane fiasco going down, ironically it was Man City's board were now completely failing the Bruina and it pissed him off so much that once he reached December with only one assist to his name he stopped waiting and started scoring himself, hitting 13 league goals, becoming the highest scoring midfielder by quite a margin, even closing it off with 4 in a single game on the same day it was announced that finally Erling Haaland would be joining him. And I know what you're thinking, that must have been the crazy season I've been teasing and I can tell you a couple things. One game in, Haaland was already claiming that these are the best passes I've ever gotten, 11 games later, the Bruina had 11 assists to his name and with Haaland seemingly banging in any ball the Bruina sent his way, from October everyone already knew City would win the league, Haaland would win the golden boots and the Bruina would top the assist charts, the real question then was the same as ever, the Champions League. And as the French commentator said in his match against Bayern, when Kevin turns all red it's a bad sign for the opponent, and it really was. After 3 assists in 4 group stage matches, the Bruina scored their assists against every team he faced right up till the final, putting down his magnum opus in the semi finals with a goal and 2 assists to force Real Madrid to finally bend to his will and though a cruel twist of fate would force him to leave the final injured once again, in the end he had led Man City to the promised lands and had gotten within 2 assists to the competition's all time record despite only playing 61% of the available minutes. And yet, no, this wasn't his best ever playmaking season, in fact it was only the third, the one campaign that made even that 1920s season look average was the one that followed. In that UCL final, the Bruina did not just have an average injury, turns out he'd been having trouble for weeks, even back in that Real Madrid game he was not supposed to have been playing in, as much as he tried to avoid surgery, the moment he came back, he didn't even play 50 minutes before he was forced into the operation table. In total, he was out for 6 months and only started his season in January, but the day he finally jumped up from the substitutes bench to warm up, the crowd made more noise than they had for any of the goals scored that night, as Klopp would admit, Kevin de Bruyne is warming up and the whole country is shaking. By the end of the season, with only 19 starts, he had 18 assists to his name, you heard me right, he missed half the season and still put on more assists than every other midfielder in the league, that's it, that's the dot you've been seeing all the way out in the horizon. With the injuries, this season may have gone unnoticed by many but, in the graph, it is impossible not to see it for what it is, absolute genius. If you run those simulations against this season, even those numbers lose all meaning, put all premier league midfielders into one and they'd need 377.000 years, make that every midfielder in the top 5 leagues and even then they'd be there for 24.000 years, finally, again, drop every single player into it regardless of position and the answer is still 235 years. So if you still somehow think that you've seen something like that before, I'm gonna show you one final graph. These are the players who've gotten the most assists in a single season in the history of the top 5 leagues. Obviously, 23-24 De Bruyne doesn't show up, but where would he be had he kept assisting at that rate but played every minute available? Well, he wouldn't have just finally broken Henry's record, he would have shattered every record in every league, flown right past Lionel Messi and Thomas Muller at 21 and reached 28 assists. So, when people question whether he's the best midfielder in premier league history and bring up Gerrard or Lampard, show them that only Giggs ever put up more assists than him and then let him sit and look at the number of matches played, it is not even a question whether he is the best midfielder. Kevin De Bruyne might be the greatest premier league player of all time. Oh and by the way, I just started an Instagram page, it's called lookers.does.football and yeah, I'm gonna be making short form content there so if you wanna be one of the first to follow, check it out. Bye.