What if Borussia Dortmund had signed Kevin de Bruyne in the summer of 2013?

The Belgian international came close to heading to the Westfalenstadion six months before he ultimately joined Wolfsburg. And that could have changed everything.

Kevin De Bruyne will have very few regrets. When he does finally hang up his boots at the Etihad Stadium at the end of the season, he’ll be able to look back on six Premier Leagues, two FA Cups and the all-important Champions League title over the course of just 10 seasons at Manchester City. Perhaps there will be some regrets over his lack of success with Belgium at international level and there was perhaps more he could have done in the Champions League final against Chelsea in 2021, but for the most part De Bruyne achieved all he could have dreamed of when he swapped the Bundesliga for the Premier League in 2015.

And yet, things could have been so different for the playmaker. As we all know, De Bruyne departed Chelsea in 2014 for a €22 million move to Wolfsburg, following an impressive loan spell at Werder Bremen. Having already shown an incredible capacity to dominate Bundesliga games at the Weserstadion, the Belgian midfielder needed little time to hit the ground running in Wolfsburg, and after just 18 months in Lower Saxony, he was once again on his way back to England to become the world-class player that we now know and love today. But that almost didn’t happen.

Six months prior to joining Wolfsburg and straight off the back of his impressive spell at Bremen, another club were desperate to sign De Bruyne: Borussia Dortmund. "I had a personal agreement [with Jürgen Klopp]," De Bruyne said in an interview in 2015, in reference to Dortmund’s attempts to sign him in the summer of 2013. "At the time, I thought it was a good decision to go, but the manager [Jose Mourinho] told me, 'You need to stay and you will get your chance here'. I accepted it and we moved on.”

De Bruyne certainly did move on. After Mourinho did little to keep his promise of game time for De Bruyne, the midfielder quickly left in January to join Wolfsburg. But what would have happened if Mourinho hadn’t sent that fateful text to delay the midfielder’s move to Germany by six months: how would that have changed the course of history at Dortmund? Would it have completely altered Klopp’s trajectory as a manager? And what would have become of De Bruyne’s career? Let’s find out.