Kevin De Bruyne was just 14 years old when faced with the first big decision that would define his future. Genk was more than two hours away – on a good day – but, he felt, the club was a better fit for his playing style.
So off he went, leaving home before even old enough to drive himself the 150 kilometres past Brussels. “That was the sacrifice I made,” De Bruyne told Goal. It was the first of many, and that it was made largely due to philosophical reasons offered a glimpse of a sense of perfectionism that would catapult this precocious adolescent into a world star.
“They were technical,” De Bruyne said. “They liked to play football the way I liked.” De Bruyne played the way Genk liked, too, and just three years later he was in the first team. “You need your chance. You need to prove what you’re worth from the beginning.” De Bruyne’s beginning brought a Belgian Cup title. He added a Pro League-winners medal shortly after.
The young Belgian was soon being courted by the biggest clubs on the continent and made the switch to Chelsea after impressing against the Blues in the UEFA Champions League. It was supposed to be the next logical step on the road to superstardom. But it proved a wrong turn. “It let me see the other side of football.” Once again, it was decision time. “It wasn’t difficult,” he says. For most 20-year-olds it would have been, but already De Bruyne was different.
A loan spell at Werder Bremen instantly showed Chelsea what they were missing, his performances earning him the award for the Bundesliga’s Young Player of the Year. He also convinced Wolfsburg to splash out three-times the fee that had taken him to Stamford Bridge in order to ensure he remained in Germany. “It was great for me because I had the chance to play again,” De Bruyne says. And there was little bad blood, too – once again, he was all business. “I didn’t have anything to prove.”
Regardless, Chelsea were quickly proven to have made a mistake. De Bruyne took the Bundesliga by storm, the key player in his team’s run to the German Cup and being named as Germany’s outstanding player as Wolfsburg finished runners-up to Bayern.
He’d tasted success, effortlessly guiding past the bumps in the road, and he wanted more. “When you get a bit older, you think more about winning.” Manchester City offered him the chance to do exactly that and he became the free-spending Premier League giants’ club-record signing in 2015, securing a £55 million deal that now looks one of the bargains of the decade.
“You never expect to get the stage I am now,” he says, “to be on the cover of [FIFA 19], which is one of the biggest on the world” The signs were there, though, right from that first time he hit the road as a 14-year-old.
Trent Sainsbury was having a nightmare. "We got absolutely spanked, 5-0," he recalls. "I was probably playing against the best player in the league at the time, Thomas Broich, and I got left on the pitch as a lesson to try and toughen me up."
It was quite a lesson, but one a young Sainsbury starting out in the game at Central Coast Mariners would heed. "Two years later, I played the same position against the same player and I just thought to myself, 'He's not going to get anywhere near the goal today.' I was Man of the Match that day."
It was a reminder to the humble Thornlie-born youngster that hard work and perseverance were to be the key to making the best of his undeniable talents, and a lesson that helped catapult him to stardom with the Australia national team.
After four years establishing himself in the A-League, Sainsbury headed to Europe on the next step of his career, joining Dutch side PEC Zwolle as he graduated to the senior international setup and became a bonafide Socceroo. By 2014, he'd become battle-hardened thanks to four years as a senior pro, but knew he still had much to learn.
"You have to be like a sponge and just soak up all the information you can get from the old heads in the national team," he insists. "Mile Jedinak was a huge inspiration to me. [Mark] Bresciano, Tim Cahill, all the older boys. Once you get into this team for a few games, you realise that the young kids look at you as the next player to be starstruck [by]."
An entire nation was starstruck in 2015 when Sainsbury played all six of Australia's matches as they romped to the AFC Asian Cup as hosts. His star had risen and, after just two years in the Netherlands, he swapped the Eredivisie for the Chinese Super League with Jiangsu Suning.
A high-profile loan switch to Italian giants Inter Milan failed to work out and, after a brief spell in Switzerland with Grasshoppers, the 27-year-old central defender is now back in the Netherlands with PSV after leading the Socceroos back-line at World Cup 2018. And he's firmly focused on his next goal: the UEFA Champions League.
"Playing in that competition is the most prestigious thing a player can do with their club," he says. "I want to be a continuous player in that environment, mix it with the best, and prove my worth." Trent Sainsbury has certainly done that before, and few would bet against him doing it again, on the biggest stage of them all.
