A new documentary has shown Kevin De Bruyne breaking down after learning City wouldn’t be offering him a new contract.
“It’s really hard,” De Bruyne says in “A Beautiful Obsession,” Pep Guardiola’s fly-on-the-wall Amazon Prime series.
“My kids don’t want to go. It’s been really stressful days, and I’m not making decisions any more based on myself. It’s easy to go to another team and play football. But it’s been a tough time for us as a family.”
The four-part series, launching August 19, covers City’s past two seasons and includes boardroom discussions on transfer policy. Guardiola doesn’t hide his own feelings on the decision either:
“It kills me,” he says of letting De Bruyne leave. Chief executive Ferran Soriano adds that De Bruyne “understood the message but was sad about it.”
De Bruyne joined City from Wolfsburg in 2015 and went on to make over 400 appearances, winning six Premier League titles and the Champions League among 16 trophies.
He left when his contract expired, later saying he’d had no offer “the whole year” and was “a bit surprised” by the decision.
The documentary also reveals tension elsewhere in the dressing room, including a heated row between Guardiola and then-captain Kyle Walker during City’s rocky 2024-25 campaign.
