Kompany opens up on Burnley secrets as Man City legend plots route to the top
Vincent Kompany stifled a burp and apologised.
“Sorry! Fizziest beer in the world, I don’t know what they gave us!” he laughed.
The title-winning Manchester City legend had just necked a drink amid the raucous celebrations of his Burnley dressing room, and amid his players’ euphoria he was reflecting, and setting more targets.
Burnley are on the up, and so is Kompany. Top clubs will be monitoring his progress. He is young, smart, and eloquent.
How has the 36-year old turned around a debt-ridden club who tumbled out of the Premier League so dramatically, with promotion clinched on Friday night with seven games to spare?
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Especially after losing seven out of contract players, 13 in total leaving, raising £70m in transfer fees?
Had he enjoyed it? What had he learned from his debut season in England?
And is he really good enough to be City boss one day, with Pep Guardiola saying it's "written in the stars"?
Kompany, 36, remembers sitting in his office on day one in charge.
“Sometimes it is a leap of faith,” he admitted. “There’s two ways to look at it. One, it is daunting, it is difficult and how are we going to do it?
“The second is the way we looked at it, it’s filled with opportunities. What if we do this? What if we manage to convince this player?
“There were things that were hard, there were decisions we had to make that were hard but they were the only reasonable decisions in order to restock and replenish the talent pool in the club.
Kompany's side beat Middlesbrough 2-1 on Friday evening to earn promotion (Richard Lee/REX/Shutterstock)“I remember the first game of the season we had Dwight McNeil and Maxwell Cornet in the building. I wouldn’t have minded to play them but we knew what we had to do.”
Sold to raise cash along with other assets Nick Pope and Nathan Collins. Eventually Kompany brought in16 new players, including 5 loans, all young and hungry. Around £25m spent.
He added: “It took us weeks to convince some of the players who are here today but eventually you get them and some of them end up being better than you thought. Some of them have not yet achieved their ceiling and that is the exciting part about it as well.
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Big names including goalkeeper Nick Pope left the club in the summer (Getty Images)“You need to have talented people in the building and we had an outstanding recruitment team and with a lot of transparency. That is the only advantage we had.”
A Championship season is a slog. There was a conversation in September with then West Brom boss Steve Bruce. Komoany said: “I’d never known a tougher fixture list. Everything crammed in. I said to Steve ‘What’s going on here?!’ It just happened we a break after that. It was a couple of days off and then ready to go again.
“We had guys with resilience, stamina in mentality and aiming to get better…”
They went from relegated to a team to being undefeated since November - while changing a defensive long ball style to free flowing, possession football.
Kompany, a four times Premier League winner at City, is humble, and “always learning.” He adds: “Every day you get confirmations, reaffirming, always believe in your principles and then the cliche of work hard.
“I try to embark on a journey with people. It is never about you. It’s not me, I’m here talking to you but there is another 20 or 30 staff in the building, who are just as involved.”
There will be changes this summer too, once a transfer embargo is lifted for filing accounts late. Kompany says financial troubles of last summer, when a big slice of a £65m loan from American finance company MSD Holdings had to be repaid after they fell out of the top flight.
Kompany has high hopes for Burnley's return to the Premier League (Richard Lee/REX/Shutterstock)He said: “I think we have remedied the problems last summer. We went down. There was a loan to repay. We paid it with the parachute money and then we sold players for whatever amount of money which I’m not allowed to disclose.
“These players are a little bit more valuable than when they came in the door and that is how we are healthy and need to go next season in the Premier League.”
Typically he wants more. The Championship title trophy. “They have to have silverware. They have to have something in our hands at the end of the season to reward what they have done this year.”
Kompany could have some big clubs knocking on his door this summer, but for now he's happy to be "making memories" at Turf Moor.
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