PSG buy Ousmane Dembele from Barcelona to replace Kylian Mbappe

PSG will make one of the most notable deals of the current off-season in the coming days. The Parisian giant, who seems about to lose his leader Kylian Mbappe, is buying his French team-mate Ousmane Dembele from Barcelona. A few years ago, the transfer of the constantly injured and not very effective Dembele, on which the Catalans spent more than €100 million in 2017, seemed almost the most unsuccessful in the history of the Spanish giant. But now he leaves him in the status of still young and extremely important for the team, from the point of view of its coach Xavi, a football player.

The topic of Ousmane Dembele’s transfer from Barcelona to PSG has been at the center of the French and Spanish press in recent days. The fact that it will take place in the near future was reported by L’Equipe, Marca and a number of other publications. In fact, Barcelona coach Xavi confirmed this, saying before the friendly match in which she beat AC Milan on Tuesday that he was “disappointed” by Dembele’s decision to leave the club, and making it clear that he was counting on him very much next season.

This statement made many of those who remember the biography of Ousmane Dembele well, for sure, caused a smile. The fact is that once his transfer seemed almost the most controversial in the history of the club.

In the summer of 2017, Barcelona shocked everyone when they sold PSG of the famous Brazilian striker Neymar for a still-record in football amount of €222 million. Shortly after this sale, they also made a big purchase. As for exactly how much Ousmane Dembele, who played for Borussia Dortmund, cost her, there are different versions. But most sources agree that only the base amount of the deal was €105 million. In addition, Borussia could have received another €30 million to €50 million from Barcelona in the form of various bonuses.

Dembele was then a 20-year-old winger, no doubt with excellent prospects. At the end of the season at Borussia, which he joined in 2016 from Rennes, he was recognized as the best newcomer of the German championship. But still, he did not draw on an asset of exceptional value, and his professional biography was still too short to confidently discern in him a future superstar, the equal of the same Neymar. At that moment, it was customary to joke that Barcelona, ​​which, thanks to the generosity of PSG, had fallen into the rain of money, simply decided to urgently spend part of the amount on some more or less prominent player, without trying to save money and bargain.

And the events that followed only confirmed the thesis that she was in a hurry with Ousmane Dembele. The Frenchman had successful matches for the Spanish club, including in the Champions League, but there were no less unsuccessful ones. And most importantly, he was constantly out of action due to various injuries, sometimes for several months.

Information that Barcelona intends to say goodbye to Ousmane Dembele appeared regularly. And if she managed to get rid of him a couple of years ago, no one would be surprised at such a move, given the low efficiency of the striker. But after the arrival at the end of 2021 of the post of coach of the Catalans Xavi and the flight from it in the summer of 2022 to PSG leader Lionel Messi, who recently went to the American Inter Miami, Dembele suddenly blossomed. In the past two seasons, he has turned into an extremely useful player, who is above all good at playing along, and broke through into the basis of the French national team. At the World Cup in Qatar at the end of last year, he was in the starting lineup in all seven of its matches in the tournament. True, the final, lost in the penalty shootout to the Argentines, did not work out for Dembele: he was replaced even before the break. It seemed as if the football player was quite satisfied with how and where his career was developing.

Explaining why PSG suddenly needed him, L’Equipe naturally mentions the main case for this club in the current summer transfer campaign. In France, it is already accepted with bitter irony to call it a “soap opera”. We are talking about the situation with the key figure in the attack of the club and the French national team, Kylian Mbappé. Back in June, he announced that he would not renew the contract with the Parisians expiring in a year, in fact, confirming that he was tired of them, and the club still couldn’t sell him in order to earn money on Mbappe, preventing him from gaining free status. agent. At the same time, PSG, judging by the fact that he did not take Kylian Mbappe on a tour of Japan and removed his photo from the club website, no longer counts on his frontman. Mauricio Pochettino, appointed coach of the team in the summer, has already made a serious personnel restructuring, inviting a whole group of well-known footballers like Marco Asensio, Milan Skrinyar, Luke Hernandez, Manuel Ugarte. But Dembele’s experience at Barcelona will clearly not be superfluous for PSG if he really remains without Mbappe.

The intrigue lies in how much the last upgrade and Ousmane Dembele, who added to the “liquidity”, will cost. In the contract he signed with Barcelona in 2022, there was a compensation clause of €50 million, but it would come into force if PSG had implemented the deal before July 31. Formally, after this date, the price of Dembele doubled, that is, approximately to the level of 2017.

Alexey Dospekhov