Barcelona made Ousmane Dembele the second most expensive signing in the world three months after his 20th birthday, and their drifting relationship speaks volumes for football’s excesses.
Whatever it was supposed to be, it almost certainly wasn’t supposed to end like this. With just hours to play in the January 2021 transfer window, the unfortunate saga of Ousmane Dembele is reaching the end of another chapter and it’s still not clear how it’s going to end, although there remains the likelihood that football’s propensity for some to fall upwards may yet mean that he ends up in Paris as part of their footballer accumulation project.
It’s all a long way removed from the summer of 2017, when Dembele arrived in Barcelona from Borussia Dortmund, having just become the second most expensive player of all time, with the club splurging half the receipts of the highest transfer fee received of all-time on him – €105m, rising to €145m with add-ons. Upon his arrival at Camp Nou, he was promptly given the number 11 shirt previously worn by Neymar. No pressure, then, though it is also worth mentioning that Ousmane Dembele was just three months past his 20th birthday when all of this happened.
What happened next has become something of a parable for our times. An injury, caused by attempting a backheel in his first full appearance for Barcelona, kept him out for almost four months, and a second injury – a fortnight after his return – kept him out for another month. He scored his first goal against Chelsea in the Champions League and then won the World Cup in the summer of 2018 with France, but since then the injuries have only become more persistent and his performances have tailed off. There was talk of issues with his diet and discipline, but he remained capable of popping up to score important goals against top-quality opposition.
When Barcelona threw all this money at Borussia Dortmund, few thought too hard about the financial ramifications of such a transfer. After all, Barca were the biggest club in the world, and they’d just received €222m from PSG for Neymar. What this overlooked, of course, was that Dembele’s wages still had to be paid on top of those of Lionel Messi, and Messi’s spiralling wages were prompting other Barcelona players to demand increases too.
The sums didn’t add up, but they hadn’t added up for Barcelona or Real Madrid for years, so why should that time be any different? None of this accounted for Covid-19, which proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for Barcelona’s finances. Messi had to be sold because they could no longer afford him. They could no longer afford Dembele either, but he didn’t want to go anywhere.
Dembele had been linked with a move back to Germany with Bayern Munich, but it seems that his wage demands are simply too high for Bayern, which is understandable if they’re anything close to the €850,000 per week that has been reported. Of course, any wage demands that start in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per week dramatically restricts the number of clubs that would be able to afford his signature. And of course, we should always be wary when this sort of story is leaked from Barcelona. The big Spanish clubs have a lengthy history of planting stories in the media for their own benefit.
But the upshot of it all is that Dembele now has six months left to run on his contract, and Barcelona very much want to to either loan him out or release him. His options for moving on are limited by his wages anyway, but that is something of an irrelevance should the player decide to to just run down the remaining months on his contract instead. Manager Xavi Hernandez has reportedly issued him with an ultimatum to either extend his contact or leave the club now, but that is, of course, a largely empty threat. Barcelona can’t unilaterally terminate his contract early without paying up what it’s worth, and of course they don’t want to do that, either, though he has now been left out of their squad.
Dembele’s response to Xavi’s attempts to strong-arm him into making a decision right now doesn’t seem to have got them very far, with a tart retort being that he will not be ‘blackmailed’ by the club. And Dembele holds all the aces. Should he wish, he can just run down his contract.
Barcelona sporting director Mateu Alemany followed Xavi’s threat up by stating that Dembele would not play for the club again because he was not ‘committed’ to its future, all of which would mean something if the player gave any indication of caring what they say about anything at all. But if Dembele doesn’t end transfer deadline day in Paris (or England, though FFP regulations continue to render the likelihood of this as slight), Xavi’s attempted strong-arm tactics will be considered to have backfired.
It’s been rumoured that Manchester United could be interested in paying him almost half a million pounds a week until the end of the season, and United are plenty familiar with paying that sort of money for an attacking player at the end of a transfer window with little apparent thought being given to what they might actually do with him. In mitigation, United do need attacking reinforcements.
Chelsea would seem a more sensible fit. Dembele’s season with Borussia Dortmund was with Thomas Tuchel so he does already know how to get the best out of him. And Chelsea remain a better bet than Manchester United to be in the Champions League next year (for now) and, of course, they are the holders of the trophy. Other clubs are likely to be interested, though he’d probably still be too expensive for Newcastle, and if Spurs can’t sign a player from Lewes without accidentally stabbing themselves in the eye with the pen, the likelihood of Ousmane Dembele looking at them and saying, ‘That’s the life for me!’ seems slight.
PSG seems more likely, but if the move to Paris comes off, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that Barcelona will be the biggest beneficiaries. They get the player removed from their wage budget, and the money freed up by this can then be spent on another spin of the transfer deadline day roulette wheel as they continue that delicate balancing act of trying to maintain their grandeur on something resembling a budget. Do PSG ‘need’ Dembele? Of course not, but they may do in the summer, should Kylian Mbappe run his contract down to its end and depart for Real Madrid.
It had seemed highly likely that January would see Mbappe finally sign a pre-contract with Real, but this hasn’t happened and there has even been conjecture that he will sign an extension with PSG, after all. But all of this wouldn’t clear a space in the PSG team until the summer. For the second half of this season he would likely have to remain a somewhat peripheral figure and he may not get much game time. And what would happen should Mauricio Pochettino leave the club in the summer? It doesn’t seem much like common sense for a club who can afford anybody to be blowing still more money on a player whose signing would, for all his undoubted talent, be a gamble.
But since when did ‘common sense’ have anything to do with either the way that PSG spend money or the career of Ousmane Dembele since he left the nurturing climes of Dortmund? His life at Barcelona became a cul-de-sac. It seems unlikely that any club other than PSG will be able to match his lofty wage demands – if there’s even anything in those rumours – and whether he’ll even kick another ball this season is, at the time of writing, very much in the balance. But it seems as likely as not that PSG will just throw it at him anyway, because they can.
Despite the question marks hanging over his attitude and how long he can go without getting injured, football deems this sort of gamble to be one worth taking. Matters will resolve themselves for Ousmane Dembele, and in a sane world his story would be worth remembering as a cautionary tale for all clubs. The biggest transfers are seldom the most successful, and the biggest gambles don’t always work out, as Barcelona found out the hard way by spending so much money on this player in the first place.
But when money is literally no object and FFP of any sort doesn’t seem to apply, there will always be space for a chosen few to fall upwards. And that, ultimately, is the future that all the biggest clubs want, insulated from failure and free to spend as much as they like without interference from anybody not already in their inner circle. In such a dysfunctional environment as top-level European football, continuing to pay vast amounts of money for the potential of Ousmane Dembele continues to make some degree of sense.
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