Steve Nicol has claimed that Manchester City could be considering selling one of their star players.
The Manchester club have shown in the past that they aren’t against selling some of their key players if they get a decent transfer offer and the player in question wants to leave.
For example, the previous summer transfer window saw the Blues pick up around £100m by selling Riyad Mahrez, Aymeric Laporte and Cole Palmer.
Now that another summer transfer window is on the horizon, one pundit has made a claim about the City’s potential stance on one current player who has recently opened up about possibly moving away from the Etihad Stadium.
Steve Nicol reckons Man City are already thinking about Kevin De Bruyne’s eventual exit
Speaking in a recent video shared on the ESPN FC YouTube channel, Nicol had this to say about Kevin De Bruyne recently saying that he’d be open to joining a club in Saudi Arabia at some point in the future.
He said: “If you’re not interested, I would assume you would say, look, it may be a lot of money but not for me.
“But the fact is, anybody who is coming up to their 33rd birthday as a professional footballer is starting to think about what happens next.
“Regardless of whether you’re playing for Manchester City and you’ve just won the Premier League.
“There’s no question he’s going to be throwing around in his head, and because he’s experienced, he knows that if his standards drop for whatever reason, and it’s probably going to be fatigue and age, why do I wait and they drop me?
“Am I waiting to get pushed out the door? Or do I keep it in my hands, make a lot of money, and the rest of my life is fixed? Absolutely you do it.”
Nicol was then asked if De Bruyne would be likely to stay at City this summer, to which he said this in response.
He said: “It depends if he gets the option. If Manchester City, and from what we’ve learned about Pep, he doesn’t want players that don’t want to be there, that would be a reason that they let him go.
“Because Pep has said it on a few occasions, ‘I don’t want people here who don’t want to be here.’ So if Kevin De Bruyne says I want to go, they might take the money because Man City are going to replace everybody eventually.
“And if they get a decent amount of money for Kevin De Bruyne from Saudi Arabia, which they will, then they replenish. Because he’s nearly 33 and they’re already thinking about Kevin De Bruyne being gone.
“What do we do when Kevin runs out of legs? What do we do if Kevin gets injured again for another five months next season? They’re already thinking that. So it shouldn’t be a problem that Kevin De Bruyne is thinking about looking after himself either, and I think he should.”
City have a decision to make about De Bruyne’s future
As things stand, the midfielder’s contract with City is set to expire in the summer of 2025, which is reportedly when clubs in Saudi Arabia want to sign the Belgian as a free agent if they don’t end up landing a deal for him this summer and he doesn’t sign a new deal with the Citizens.
This makes it clear to us that the club have a big decision to make regarding the £400k-a-week midfielder’s future in terms of whether they offer him a contract extension or not.
In our view, the fact that he scored four goals and delivered 10 assists in just 18 Premier League games this season shows that he still has a lot to offer the team and keeping him in the squad beyond 2025 would be a big positive.