It is just over two months until the start of the Premier League campaign and Kevin De Bruyne is already facing a fight to be fit for Manchester City’s first game of the season.
The Belgian midfielder snapped his hamstring in the first-half of Saturday’s Champions League final against Inter Milan.
He will undergo tests in the coming days to understand the severity of the injury but reports suggest he could miss the start of next season, with recovery for the most severe problem taking up to three months, say The Daily Mail.
Speaking after City’s win over Inter, De Bruyne also revealed that he has been suffering with a hamstring tear for the past two months.
“I’ve been struggling for two months, since the Bayern Munich game away,” he said. “So I missed I would say a fair amount of games but it was all small ruptures. I snapped it all the way here so I wasn’t able to go on.
“Obviously I missed some games but the games like Arsenal, Bayern and Real Madrid I managed to do it.
“I had some personal things that happened with my family on top of that and I managed that. the intensity with which I play that I put my body on the line.”
He added: “I give everything for my team and the people in the club know that. I feel proud that I’ve been able to do what I did.
“It’s a shame that it went the way it did for me but we go away winning the Champions League so there’s nothing bad towards it.”
City are expected to return to pre-season training in just four weeks ahead of their tour of South Korea and Japan.
De Bruyne also confirmed in his post-match comments that he will miss Belgium’s upcoming Euro qualifiers against Austria and Estonia.
“I’ll probably take a scan somewhere this week. I’ll be out of the national team 100 percent, I know that, which is a shame because I would have played my 100th game.”
Ahead of Saturday’s game, City manager Pep Guardiola challenged De Bruyne to have “the best game of his life” in Istanbul.
“I said to Kevin, be angry, be upset, shout. Sometimes when he’s flat, sometimes you have to, on the pitch, have a bad face. Sometimes he’s too nice, so nice, a lovely, lovely guy,” the Spaniard told CBS Sports.
“When a guy is thinking more about making assists than scoring goals, it means how generous you are. He is. He’s happy making assists and [leaving] the compliments for the other ones.
“He doesn’t have highlights for the media? It’s ok, he’s happy. It’s just sometimes I say ‘come on Kevin, show me. Show me in the final of the Champions League how good you are, how important you are. Make the best game of your life on that day.'”