Almost certainly he will not be able to do it on the pitch, but Ousmane Dembélé will complete his third season as a player in the FC Barcelona. The Frenchman, despite the fact that he has shown details of his undoubted talent, has been persecuted by tremendous bad luck with injuries since he arrived in 2017, so his credit is running out and this summer he will be heard offers for him.
FC Barcelona has many troops up front for next season: Leo Messi, Luis Suárez, Antoine Griezmann, Ansu Fati, Martin Braithwaite, Francisco Trincao, Pedri… In these circumstances, the Barça club is totally open to listen to proposals by Ousmane Dembélé and, according to the newspaper ‘Sport’, could accept one of them if they can recover a significant part of the money they invested in it.
In recent months, there was talk of 60 million euros as the minimum amount for which Barça would agree to sell to the French winger. The directive headed by Josep Maria Bartomeu You need to minimize losses and get money in sales after the coronavirus crisis and consider that this is the amount that remains to be amortized of Ousmane Dembélé. Anything lower than that price would mean losses.
That price at which the Catalan entity would have priced its footballer could be unattainable for any club. In the first place, because the economic impact caused by the coronavirus health crisis has reduced the capacity of large clubs for making significant disbursements in transfers; secondly, because no sports management trusts in taking for those amounts a player who has been chaining physical problems for three years.
Of course, FC Barcelona still has another card to ‘place’ Ousmane Dembélé, and that is to yield him with a mandatory purchase option to pay before June 30, 2020. A method that would prevent the case of Philippe Coutinho, who went on loan to Bayern Munich with a non-compulsory purchase option that the Bavarians did not execute, creating a problem for the culé club with the Brazilian.
If it doesn’t go, it will count for Setién
FC Barcelona will not sell to sell and, if a convincing offer does not come, Ousmane Dembélé will enter into Quique Setien’s sports plans. The quality of the ‘mosquito’ is beyond doubt for the club, so giving it another year of margin for it to explode does not pose any problem for planning. Of course, the French will have even more competition than in these three years.
