Fading hopes of a top-four finish aren’t Chelsea fans’ only worries, as their former stars, Mo Salah and Kevin De Bruyne are the two front-runners for the Premier League’s PFA Player of the Year.
The latter has spoken of his troubled spell with the Blues, admitting that he wasn’t particularly close with Jose Mourinho during their shared time at Stamford Bridge. The Manchester City ace even went as far as to state that the relationship between the pair was ‘distant’.
De Bruyne could secure his first Premier League winners’ medal on Saturday afternoon as him and his City team-mates take on arch-rivals Manchester United at the Etihad. However, the biggest news currently surrounding the Belgium international is that he only spoke to Mourinho twice during their six-month spell together with the Blues.
When asked about his relationship with the Portuguese manager, the 26-year-old told the BBC’s Premier League Show: “I would say distant. I’m not really someone who speaks a lot with coaches.
“I think if a coach wants to speak with you then you just do it. He’s the boss. You can be good with each other but still there’s distance between a coach and a player.
“I only spoke with him twice, that’s when I wanted to leave to go to Dortmund in the beginning of the summer, and then the second meeting I just said, ‘For me it’s better to go, I want to play football.'”
These lack of first-team opportunities led De Bruyne’s time at Chelsea to be cut short and unfortunately, for everything good Mourinho did in West London, this was one of his worst decisions. It is one that has come back to haunt his former side this season as the former Wolfsburg midfielder scored the only goal in City’s dominant 1-0 win at the Bridge at the end of September.
For the first half of the campaign, Kevin De Bruyne was running away with the Player of the Year award but with Salah’s incredible recent form, it will be very close between the two ex-Chelsea players for English football’s biggest individual accolade.
