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.