According to his peers, City midfielder Kevin De Bruyne was a standout player last season, but the football writers disagreed
The 2014 FIFA World Cup Ballon d'Or was won by Lionel Messi. He's not the best player in the tournament. He's not even the best player in argentina in the tournament (Javier Mascherano is), but in a broader sense, he's the best player in the world. When Messi won an award again, that reason became blurred.
It's reasonable to say that Kevin de Bruyne is the premier League's best footballer; his range of passes and crosses has allowed him to excel at all times, and regardless of the injury 2018/19 season, he has had 18, 16, 20 and 12 assists in the last four full seasons, and this steady level of creativity is almost unparalleled in its past. If the era before the department showed that Eric Cantona, Thierry Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo were its rulers, perhaps this was the era of De Bruyne.
None of this automatically made him a player who performed well last season. But his peers (or enough people, anyway) think he is. De Bruyne was named PFA Player of the Year, retaining his title. Perhaps footballers think Manchester City is the best team and De Bruyne is the best of them.
On the other hand, he may be the third or fourth most important contributor to City's title winnings. Rubendiaz was a transformative figure, and his signing greatly improved the defensive record and John Stones. Ilkay Gundogan was the catalyst, scoring 11 goals in two consecutive months in 21 consecutive victories for Manchester City, which was crucial. He is the killer of Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur. If Gundogan's brilliant outburst is an outlier for him, then De Bruyne's form feels more typical.
However, while the votes of the players may have been partly due to his outstanding performances in Manchester City's Champions League quarter-finals and semi-finals, he missed key wins of the league season; Anfield's 4-1. He was also sidelined when they beat Tottenham Hotspur 3-0.
Different voters have different standards. Football writers (including this one) worked hard for Díaz, the first defender to win the award since Steve Nicol in the 1980s. Last year, they also ignored De Bruyne. Jordan Henderson was a symbolic choice, with voters choosing Liverpool's collective splendor over the Belgian's individual talent.
Each award is shaped by context. Every nominee can fail because of the excellence of others. Statistically, De Bruyne's best season was 2019-20, with 13 league goals and a record 20 assists. Personally, his level of performance peaked in the 2017-18 season.
As City embarked on a 100-point campaign, he gradually became the front-runner for personal honours until Mohamed Salah, who made a stunning 22-game start to his debut season with Liverpool, accelerated by 24 goals as he began. Egyptians have won twice as many PFA and FWA awards.
Now De Bruyne has completed a different type of double, becoming the third player to win a PFA award, and the other two — Henry and Ronaldo — have also won the FWA vote in both seasons, but neither of them. Maybe it's an imbalance that will be corrected in the coming years.
After all, there's already a sense that De Bruyne is the well-deserved winner of PFA honors, and even if this time he wins the wrong year, perhaps now Díaz will have to hope for good luck to be balanced over several awards seasons. In one game Liverpool were favourites to win the title, another was Manchester City, one with his stats bouncing off the page and the other not so much.
There is always the temptation to look for anomalies, to compare different players in different seasons, and sadly, some people have spoken out in some ways. Maybe few people consider casting a ballot; maybe some are low-information voters who watch the game relatively little. But there is one conclusion that feels simple. Other footballers consider Kevin de Bruyne to be a very good player. They weren't wrong.