It became possible to watch Doku beat three players in a phone box and still hear the football equivalent of “yes, but can he do it on a rainy Tuesday”.

Now the numbers have arrived as well, and Manchester City suddenly possess something they have lacked for large stretches of this season: an attacker capable of making elite defences look structurally unsound on his own.

Five goals and two assists in his last five games is the sort of streak that changes perception because it changes consequence. Doku’s brilliance no longer feels decorative. It is deciding matches.

His equaliser against Everton, his goal that broke Brentford’s resistance, the growing sense that every time he receives the ball with space ahead of him something catastrophic might happen – this is the final evolutionary step City have waited for.

The terrifying thing for the rest of the Premier League is that the underlying skillset was already among Europe’s best.

Doku has been perhaps the continent’s most devastating one-v-one winger for two years. He leads dribble metrics almost by default, wins fouls at absurd rates and creates permanent instability in defensive shapes.

The issue was always whether he could convert that destruction into goals and assists often enough to justify building an attack around him.

Now it suddenly looks obvious.

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There are moments lately where Doku resembles the prototype around which modern super-clubs are increasingly built. Barcelona have Lamine Yamal, Bayern Munich have Michael Olise, while Paris Saint-Germain essentially field an entire front line of hyper-mobile dribbling mutants designed to attack isolated defenders repeatedly until resistance collapses.

City, by contrast, have spent much of the Guardiola era pursuing control above all else. Surgical passing. Positional superiority. Death by geometry.

But elite football in 2026 increasingly belongs to teams with players who can simply detonate games.

Doku gives City that. Properly gives them that.

The important distinction is that this is not merely hot finishing form. The goals matter, obviously, but more significant is the aggression.

Doku is shooting earlier, driving centrally more often and playing with the conviction of someone who has realised defenders are genuinely frightened of him.

That psychological shift matters. Elite dribblers become elite attackers when they stop treating the final action as an obligation and start treating it as inevitable.

There is also a wider tactical benefit for City. For years, opponents have defended them by compressing central spaces and trusting wide areas to contain danger.

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Doku destroys that logic because leaving him isolated against a full-back is effectively volunteering for repeated emergency situations. Once help arrives, gaps appear elsewhere.

Suddenly, Erling Haaland has room. Suddenly, the half-spaces reopen. Suddenly City resemble City again.

It may ultimately arrive too late to salvage the title race. Arsenal still hold the advantage and City have spent too much of this campaign oscillating between strangely passive and weirdly fragile.

But there is a reason the mood around Doku has shifted so dramatically in the last fortnight. Even supporters who always believed in the talent are starting to talk about “metamorphosis” and “elite goalscoring winger” territory.

And if that transformation is real, City’s next great side may already have found its chaos merchant.

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