The 18-year-old became the latest youth prospect to make the leap from the Elite Development Squad to Pep Guardiola’s ranks and the seamless way he moved from one to the other suggests a bright future for the boyhood Blue.
And with 23 senior appearances in all competitions already under his belt, Lewis is already looking like quite a prospect.
Each season, Guardiola tweaks his tactics, positional thinking and innovates like no other manager and this was emphasised again through the evolving defender/midfielder role.
And it speaks volumes that the manager entrusted Lewis to be one of the players undertake the responsibility.
Since making his league debut in our 4-0 win over Bournemouth, Lewis’ versatility has been tried and tested in a variety of positions – right-back, left-back, centre-back, and defensive midfielder.
His ability to help move the ball forward with his sublime dribbling or his eye for difficult through balls often caused numerous headaches for opposing teams.
In his 902 minutes in the top-flight this season, Lewis has taken the top spot for pass completion rate. Aged 18.
At 92.2%, he has the best rate of any teenager in Europe’s top five leagues that have attempted a minimum of 500 passes.
To complement that, he also has the best open play passing accuracy of any full-back in the Premier League with 91.8%.
And when in a squad full of some of the best players in the world, Lewis knows that he has to prove what he can bring to Guardiola’s squad when given the chance.
And he did just that in his full Champions League debut.
The England Under-21 international’s name could be etched in history for some time with the record he broke.
His goal in our 3-1 win over Sevilla made him the youngest player in Champions League history to score on his first start in the competition, previously held by Karim Benzema.
At 17 year and 346 days, nerves were a distant memory for Lewis as he celebrated his first goal at the Etihad.
After a warm embrace from Guardiola at full-time, it comes as no surprise the levels of praise the boss has for Lewis.
“We’ve seen it since day one in the United States when he played a few minutes against Bayern Munich, and in training sessions we felt he had something special,” said Pep.
“He’s aggressive enough defensively, he has a lot of margin to improve but on the ball playing inside he is so good and outside he showed today [win over Sevilla] good crossing, one against one in the final third.”
From sitting his exams one year to being part of a Treble-winning team, Lewis hasn’t got to just watch his team make history, he’s been right in the thick of it.
And as he walked around the pitch at the Ataturk Stadium a Champions League winner with 25,000 City fans chanting, “Rico! Rico! Rico!”, he could have been forgiven for pinching himself that it was all some fantastic dream.
