BARCELONA – Ousmane Dembélé will most likely return to start next Sunday in the final of the Spanish Super Cup against Athletic Bilbao. It will be the fifth consecutive match in which the French forward will compete in the starting eleven of a Barcelona that, three and a half years after his signing, is still waiting for the emergence of the player who arrived to take Neymar’s place and who along with Philippe. Coutinho the failure of the Barça club’s sports policy in recent seasons.
Dembélé collects 17 of the 25 official games played by Barça this season and in the Super Cup final he will already double the nine he added up last season, linking barely two to, slaughtered through injuries, in a haunting soccer player. These are optimistic data, the current ones, which, however, do not hide the fiasco they represent.
The second most expensive asset in its history behind the Brazilian, Dembélé’s costs for Barça have already risen to 130 million euros, the result of which on the field has barely found an answer. And it’s that in addition to the endless injuries the Frenchman has suffered since his arrival in the summer of 2017 (ten in all), his athletic performance, when it was available, has largely failed to live up to what was expected.
Daring, vertical, ambidextrous, unpredictable and very fast at dribbling, from the outside he could play in one of two bands and become a perfect partner for Messi due to his ability to switch off and his excellent virtues as an assistant (21 assists in his last season with Borussia Dortmund) there was hardly any news as a Barça player.
It is indeed worth it that he lost against Real Sociedad in the semi-final of the Super Cup on Wednesday 41 balls, a figure you rarely see, and who barely managed five dribbles out of the nearly twenty he tried.
TRUST AND INJURIES
Barça, however, is not considering his transfer. In fact, at the moment it is a chimera when he enters his last year and a half of his contract and when he thought about it it was economically impossible to find a successful exit when you take into account the high costs this will bring to the club. means.
Ronald Koeman trusts him, it is not known whether out of necessity or conviction, and at Camp Nou, fingers are crossed in anticipation of a final outcome. Perhaps understanding that he is facing his last chance as long as he doesn’t injure himself again, a common circumstance since he signed.
In December, he suffered an extension of the biceps femoris in his right leg, which was the last physical accident to hurt him. It didn’t reach the severity of the one he’d contracted in February, and that took him seven months off the field, but it did add a new chapter to his long, never-ending history.
Dembélé has added a whopping 534 days off due to injury since he first ran in Getafe in September 2017, missing a total of 85 games. In three and a half seasons, Barça has played 195 official matches, of which the Frenchman has only participated in 91 (including 59 as a starter), which explains no doubt that he has come nowhere close to what he was pursuing on the day of his signing . .