Expert view from Germany: Leroy Sane lightning quick, but is he a Pep Guardiola player?

The 20-year-old is in Manchester to finalise the transfer – but what can City fans expect from their prospective new signing?

We asked Fabian Kunze of Eurosport.de for his expert insight…

Sane is a typical winger: he can play on both sides, right and left at great speed. His greatest plus point is his age – still just 20 – so he is totally carefree and doesn’t give a damn about playing against big names. Just watch his goal against Real Madrid in the 2014-15 Champions League campaign - needless to say, that it was his first ever Champions League match.

Normally he uses his speed to dumbfound his opponents, but he also has good dribbling skills and always wants to get to the goal as directly as possible.

Sane made his first appearance in the Bundesliga in November 2014 and it didn’t take long before he was a starter for Schalke, who gave him a professional contract starting from July 1, 2015.

Then everything went really fast for Sane, with Jogi Low calling him for the Germany national team’s friendly matches in November 2015. He debuted on the horrible night of the Paris attacks against France in the Stade de France, but even the events of this evening didn’t change his way of playing football.

He is still a player who wants to have fun on the pitch - but he has also grown in a go-to guy for Schalke in critical situations (as well as Klaas-Jan Huntelaar).

I don’t think so… Sane is kind of a street footballer, who plays instinctively and might lose some of his biggest strengths when being pushed into a very rigid system like Guardiola likes to play with his teams, with a specific function for each player. Perhaps it’s comparable to Franck Ribery at Bayern Munich, who lost his sense of fun playing football under Guardiola’s reign.

Let’s see… He is the son of Souleyman Sané, who was capped 55 times for Senegal, and Regina Weber, a successful rhythmic gymnast back in the 1980s - she was the first and still the only medalist in rhythmic gymnastics at the Olympics for Germany, winning bronze in 1984.