Burnley's FA Cup visit to Manchester City won’t quite be a final audition for Vincent Kompany, but it is a chance for the Belgian to show that talk of an eventual return to the Etihad as manager is based on more than sentiment.
It is almost four years since Kompany lifted the famous old trophy at Wembley to confirm an historic domestic clean sweep for Pep Guardiola’s team before announcing he was leaving the club he had served with such distinction for 11 years.
He decided it would be a case of going back to the future to pursue his next ambition of becoming a coach, returning to his first love, Anderlecht, initially as player-manager.
12 months later, City gave a glimpse into their thinking on who would eventually step into Guardiola’s training shoes by offering their former captain the chance to join the coaching staff. Kompany told them he preferred to be his own man and that he would learn more about himself and the game by working his way back to the top on his own terms.
He also felt compelled to stay loyal to Craig Bellamy, the former City team-mate who Kompany had taken to Anderlecht. It has always been City’s intention to promote from within, in the hope that the manager’s office would one day be filled by one of their own.
When Roberto Mancini was sacked after the humbling defeat to Wigan in the 2013 FA Cup Final, the message from inside the club was that there was a succession plan in place designed to enable Patrick Vieira to one day take the reins.
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The Frenchman had decided to go into coaching after spending two years learning about the inner workings of the City Football Group at executive level. Vieira spent two years helping young hopefuls at academy level before becoming coach of sister club New York City.
Even when he left in 2018, first for Nice and then to become Crystal Palace manager, he retained a number of influential admirers in the boardroom. The admiration for Kompany runs even deeper. He joined the City from Hamburg a week before the Abu Dhabi United Group’s £300 million takeover transformed the Sky Blues into juggernauts that have won six Premier League titles in the last 10 years.
Club officials were so embarrassed by the state of the training ground at Carrington that they gave Kompany a tour of the then-Eastlands Stadium when they were launching their charm offensive rather than the ramshackle facility that had changed little since it was a social club for the workers at nearby Shell.
When Kompany did arrive at Carrington, he found a facility that was so unfit for purpose that there was only one boxing glove to go with the punch-bag hanging in the gym.
The Belgian defender played such a role in City’s emergence that a statue of him was erected outside the Etihad. The quarter-final trip to face his old club later this month will take his team past the bronze figure celebrating the spectacular goal against Leicester that was so instrumental in that domestic quadruple of 2019.
Even Guardiola has predicted that Kompany is destined to follow in his footsteps. Only a spectacular late-season collapse will prevent him returning to the Premier League next season with Burnley, by which time the Catalan will have two years left on his contract.
Kompany took on a huge rebuilding job at Turf Moor last summer. The price of relegation was the loss of experienced campaigners like Nick Pope, James Tarkowski, Ben Mee and Dwight McNeil.
But Kompany hasn’t only restructured the squad, he has introduced a philosophy that has brought admiring glances from other big clubs as well as City. Kompany still owns the same executive box at the Etihad that he had when he was lifting trophies as a player.
He watched games with a cap pulled tight to his head, but that powerful physique that once intimidated the best strikers in the world makes him instantly recognisable to those who know where to look. You can be sure the 36-year-old won’t have been turning up just to admire the view.
