Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has claimed that he was right to sell Belgian playmaker Kevin De Bruyne and stated that he wouldn’t have reached the same level if he was not sold.
Chelsea sold the young Belgian to VFL Wolfsburg in the winter transfer window of 2014 for only £18 million and now Manchester City are ready to splash £50 million on the star midfielder.
The 24-year-old reached his peak while playing for Wolfsburg and was the key for their second finish in Bundesliga and winning the DFB Pokal.
He was awarded “Bundesliga Player of the Year” in the 2014-15 season for his brilliant season at Volkswagen Arena scoring 10 goals and 21 assists. His assists tally is a record in Bundesliga.
But Mourinho claims De Bruyne was not ready to compete for a first-team place at Stamford Bridge and was constantly ‘crying’ for a move when he was sold to Wolfsburg 18 months ago.
Mourinho claimed: “With De Bruyne if you have a player knocking on your door and crying every day he wants to leave, you have to make a decision. At that time, Chelsea did well.”
.“If De Bruyne stayed here, not happy and not motivated, and we’d sold him after a year, we’d have got less – 50 percent less than we sold him for. So we sold him. At that moment, it was very good business.”
“If somebody comes and pays for him what somebody would pay for Messi or Cristiano, it looks from the eyes of the world that it’s bad business from us.”
“But, if he was at Chelsea and not at Wolfsburg, he wouldn’t have reached this level. It was like a wall, a block. He was not ready to compete. He was an upset kid, training very bad.”
“He always said he had trained well in his life, but he needs the motivation to train well by playing every game. Andre Schurrle a bit the same.”
“If you think it (De Bruyne’s sale) is my mistake, then it’s my mistake that Eden Hazard is worth more than £100million.”
“What I cannot do is bring us up to a certain level and then not play him. If I don’t play Hazard and play De Bruyne or Andre Schurrle, they would have been playing for Chelsea, but Hazard wouldn’t.”