BARCELONA – Ousmane Dembélé will most likely return to the starting line-up this Sunday in the Spanish Super Cup final against Athletic Bilbao. It will be the fifth consecutive game that links the French striker 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 came to take the place of Neymar and who next by Philippe Coutinho personalizes the failure of the Barça club’s sports policy in recent seasons.
Dembélé has accumulated 17 of the 25 official matches played by Barça this season and in the final of the Super Cup he will already double the nine he totaled last season, in which he barely tied 02:00 to become, massacred by injuries, a ghost footballer. These are optimistic data, the current ones, which, however, do not hide the fiasco it represents.
The second most expensive signing in his history behind the Brazilian, the cost of Dembélé for Barça has already skyrocketed to 130 million euros, the result on the pitch barely if they have found an answer. And it is that beyond the infinity of injuries that the Frenchman has suffered since his arrival in the summer of 2017 (ten in total), his sporting performance, when he has been available, has not largely met what s ‘I expected.
Bold, vertical, ambidextrous, unpredictable and very fast in the water, from the outside he could play on either side and become a perfect partner for Messi for his ability to demarcate and his outstanding virtues as a assistant (21 assists in his last season with Borussia Dortmund) there has been little news as Barça.
It is worth noting that on Wednesday, in the semifinal of the Super Cup against Real Sociedad he lost 41 pilots, A figure seldom seen, and which scarcely came out airy in five streams of the nearly twenty he attempted.
CONFIDENCE AND INJURIES
Barça, however, are not considering his transfer. In fact, nowadays thinking about it is a chimera when it enters its last year and a half of contract and when it was thought about it it was impossible to find a windy way out financially if we take into account the high cost that means for the club.
Ronald Koeman trusts him, it is not known whether out of necessity or conviction, and at the Camp Nou his fingers are crossed waiting for a final hatching. Perhaps on the understanding that he is facing his last chance as long as he does not get injured again, a common circumstance since he signed.
In December he suffered an elongation in the femoral biceps of his right leg which meant the last physical mishap that harmed him. He did not get the severity of the one he suffered in February and that took him away from the pitch for seven months but he did add a new chapter to his long, endless, history.
Sum Dembélé has been sidelined for less than 534 days due to injury since suffering his first injury in Getafe in September 2017, causing a total of 85 games to be lost. In three and a half seasons, Barça has played 195 official matches, of which the Frenchman has taken part in only 91 (59 of them as a starter), which he explains without concealing that he has not achieved what he set out to do on the day of his signing.