BARCELONA – Ousmane Dembélé will probably return to start this Sunday in the Spanish Super Cup final against Athletic Bilbao. It will be the fifth consecutive game in which the French striker joined in the starting eleven of a Barcelona that three and a half years after signing is still waiting for the appearance of the player who came to take the place of Neymar and who together with Philippe Coutinho customizes the political failure Barça’s sports club in recent seasons.
Dembélé is accumulating 17 of the 25 official games played by Barça this season and in the Super Cup final he will already double the nine he totaled last season, in which he barely tied two to become, massacred by injuries , in a ghost footballer. These are optimistic data, the current ones, which, however, do not hide the fiasco they represent.
The second most expensive signing in his history behind the Brazilian, Dembélé’s cost for Barça has already reached 130 million euros, the result of which on the field has barely been answered. And, beyond the endless injuries that the Frenchman has suffered since coming in the summer of 2017 (ten in total), his athletic performance, when available, did not largely meet what was expected.
Bold, vertical, ambidextrous, unpredictable and very fast in dribbling, from the outside he could play in either team and become a perfect partner for Messi due to his ability to uncheck and his remarkable virtues as an assistant (21 assists in the last his season with Borussia Dortmund) there was hardly any news as a Barça player.
In fact, it is worth losing in the Super Cup semi-final against Real Sociedad on Wednesday 41 balls, a figure rarely seen and who barely managed five dribbles out of the almost twenty he tried.
CONFIDENCE AND INJURY
Barça, however, do not consider his transfer. In fact, at the moment, thinking about it is a chimera when entering the last year and a half of his contract, and when he thought about it, it was impossible to find a successful exit from an economic point of view, if one takes considering the high cost it represents to 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 appearance. Maybe he understands that he is facing his last chance as long as he doesn’t get hurt again, a common circumstance since he signed.
In December, he suffered an elongation of the biceps femoris in his right leg, which was the last physical injury that affected him. He did not reach the severity of the one he suffered in February and this took him off the field for seven months, but he added a new chapter to his long and endless history.
Dembélé adds no less than 534 days off due to injury, since he suffered his first in Getafe in September 2017 and this led him to miss a total of 85 games. In three and a half seasons, Barça played 195 official matches, in which the Frenchman participated in only 91 (of which 59 as a starter), which explains without disguise that he did not get anywhere near what he was looking for on the day. its signing. .