When anonymously sourced stories first appeared within the French media, within the final week of July, claiming that Barcelona winger Ousmane Dembélé was near leaving for Paris Saint-Germain by way of the €50 million launch clause in his contract, it appeared preposterous. The best learn, at first, was that it needed to be shit-stirring by Dembélé’s agent, Moussa Sissoko, to strain Barcelona right into a extra accommodating perspective in extension talks. However, it turned out, it was true.
Bedeviled by accidents and inconsistency within the years since Barça paid over €100 million to accumulate him from Borussia Dortmund, Dembélé appeared lastly to have discovered steady—for him, anyway—well being over the 2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23 seasons. Together with that he’d established himself ultimately, each as one of many world’s most harmful attackers with the ball at his toes and as certainly one of supervisor Xavi’s express favorites. In a summer season, and a ruinous monetary situation, wherein Barcelona must be on the very least prepared to promote just about any participant (or organizational subsidiary, or piece of workplace furnishings) with severe suitors, the membership put the message out by way of all its numerous mouthpieces that, on Xavi’s insistence, Dembélé was among the many crew’s only a few untouchables.
But it surely hadn’t all the time been that approach. In the summertime of ’22, with the membership’s funds in an identical state of catastrophic emergency, Barcelona’s management waged an ugly public strain marketing campaign towards Dembélé, with the purpose of coercing him into both signing a contract extension with a decrease wage determine or accepting a direct switch. On the time, Dembélé’s present contract each paid him a wage far past the membership’s present finances and was as a consequence of expire in the summertime, and Barcelona could not danger shedding certainly one of its finest and most useful gamers—and somebody whose gaudy switch worth performed no small half in wrecking the membership’s funds—for nothing. The perimeters finally labored out a stopgap settlement: Dembélé prolonged his contract by way of the summer season of 2024, with the understanding that the events would use the extra time to barter the phrases of an extended extension to be finalized the subsequent summer season.
That ugly struggle—throughout which sporting director Mateu Alemany notably decreed that Dembélé could be exiled from the squad till he relented to the membership’s calls for, in a foreshadowing of this summer season’s struggle between PSG and Kylian Mbappé—did not simply disappear from reminiscence when the 2 sides signed the contract extension. It now appears to have lingered in Dembélé’s thoughts, as anybody might need guessed it could; furthermore, in hindsight everyone ought to have anticipated it could bitter Dembélé’s emotions towards the membership, probably as much as eternally.
Ordinarily none of this would possibly matter, a minimum of so far as the query of the place Dembélé would play this coming season. He had a contract, freshly prolonged, making him a Barcelona participant, and the membership (as far as anyone has reported) had no intention of parting with him. Below extraordinary circumstances, even when Dembélé had made public a want to depart this summer season, Barça might have anticipated to set the phrases by which he’d get his want. That is usually how this works.
However that contract seems to have had a minimum of one humorous provision in it: a €50 million launch clause—a cut price for a participant of Dembélé’s age (26), profile (a real two-footed winger with racehorse velocity and the confirmed means to supply each objectives and assists), and prominence inside Xavi’s squad—that will robotically improve to €100 million if no one executed it by July 31 of this 12 months. Or, effectively, that seems to be how the membership understood the clause. It is definitely how all of the membership’s attendant press described it throughout all of the months of reporting round extension negotiations: a €50 million launch clause that will double in worth on August 1.
It now seems that any person (or a number of somebodies) inside Barcelona did not do the studying. What Dembélé really had, we now know, was a €100 million launch clause, and likewise a wholly separate “contract of switch obligation” that will compel Barcelona to just accept any bid of €50 million that Dembélé agreed to, supplied it arrived earlier than that July 31 deadline. As the Athletic’s Po Ballús reported:
Whereas the €100 million launch clause must be triggered by way of an official and extra sophisticated course of involving La Liga—which holds Dembele’s registration—this “contract of switch obligation” merely compelled Barça to just accept any bid of €50m. Not everyone on the Catalan membership realized this, and that’s the reason there was such confusion on the weekend.
That may not be an enormous distinction. However this “contract of switch obligation” successfully renders the €100 million launch clause totally decorative. That is not even the funniest half! Right here is the funniest half: Within the occasion Dembélé executed this provision, and introduced in a €50 million bid by July 31, the contract of switch obligation “would see Barça obtain half of the €50 million and the participant the opposite €25 million.”
Wait, right here, let’s give this the suitable weight.
The contract of switch obligation “would see Barça obtain half of the €50 million and the participant the opposite €25 million.”
That’s to say, Barcelona negotiated a contract with its most useful attacker, its supervisor’s tactical lynchpin, wherein not solely might any membership on the market have him for much lower than Barcelona would take into account truthful worth, however Barcelona itself would obtain solely half that sum—could be compelled, contractually, to half with that participant for under just a little more cash than Manchester Metropolis is getting in return for academy children with zero significant first-team expertise. Furthermore Dembélé himself, within the occasion one other crew made him a sufficiently engaging wage supply, might earn himself a fast €25 million fee in return for forcing Barcelona to eat this shit sandwich. And—and!—on high of that, no one at Barcelona apparently understood these info, a few contract the membership itself negotiated and signed.
Other than the “not understanding a contract it agreed to” bit, this was a more-or-less prepared concession on the membership’s half, granted in trade for Dembélé agreeing to a lowered wage at a time when Barcelona had determined have to shrink its wage invoice. The existence of the supply, appalling because it might sound, displays the membership’s dire circumstances, and as such is comprehensible and not likely deserving of criticism. It is the “not understanding a contract it agreed to” bit that displays a lot the identical contemptible combination of hubris and incompetence that created these dire circumstances within the first place.
For years Barcelona operated as if més que un membership exempted it from having to care about particulars and penalties, about competence, about prices and proportions and amortization and all else—just like the stereotype of the profligate jock saying sure to each second-cousin-once-removed’s cockamamie steamboat restaurant pitch as a result of he cannot conceive of the large paychecks drying up whereas he is nonetheless a younger man with many years of bill-paying forward of him. The membership might splash 100 million euros shopping for this or that star participant with no stable plan for his use, get nothing out of him, bury him on the bench, and splash one other hundred million euros on his substitute. It might depart a path of incinerated cash and alienated gamers in its wake; everyone would nonetheless need to come there, and keep there, and show themselves equal to the shirt.
COVID-19 punctured the membership’s fantasy of monetary invincibility, and confirmed it an actual world the place FC Barcelona can merely exit of enterprise like another dead-broke enterprise. However the twin fantasy, of a mystique invulnerable to reputational hurt and highly effective sufficient to overwrite what’s true about an individual, persists: No one imagined Ousmane Dembélé would possibly need a change of surroundings greater than he’d need to reconcile, and thus that it is perhaps urgently necessary to know all of the means by which he would possibly discover that change. Extra to the purpose, no one imagined that the human price of treating him like shit for a complete summer season would possibly surpass the attract of the shirt. No one imagined that Barcelona finally would possibly simply be, to a employee, much less a non secular vacation spot than a office—and a crappy one, the type that employee would possibly simply need to depart.
That is solely one of many methods the membership nonetheless operates as if exempt from the constraints of actuality. In latest days there have been stories that Dembélé was motivated to depart partly by public rumors that Barcelona had provided him and 18-year-old star midfielder Gavi to Paris Saint-Germain in a proposed swap for Kylian Mbappé—an insane and unimaginable concept that Barcelona could not make work even when PSG jumped at it, and which could not even be superior with out any person pressuring these two gamers to depart the membership. What issues right here is much less whether or not that provide really existed and extra how drearily believable its existence appears: At this level solely a idiot would financial institution on Barcelona performing, or restraining itself from performing, out of both loyalty or good sense.
Barcelona is thought to have been in pursuit of Manchester Metropolis’s Bernardo Silva and João Cancelo for months—star gamers of their primes, both of whose price ticket by itself would surpass what the broke membership’s complete summer season switch finances ought to be. Earlier than that it was a doomed public pursuit of stars Joshua Kimmich and Martín Zubimendi to fill the defensive midfield spot vacated by Sergio Busquets, adopted by a fallback to Oriol Romeu for one thing on the order of a tenth as a lot as both of these two would have price—and the membership nonetheless hasn’t been in a position to register his signing, as a result of it will possibly’t afford to. Earlier than that, it was the delusional, degrading courtship of Lionel Messi, when the membership’s brass had the gall to easily repeat the identical empty, unsecured guarantees it made to him the summer season earlier than he left.
That is deranged. As of this writing, a mere handful of days earlier than the official kickoff of the La Liga season, Barcelona has 13 complete first-team gamers registered with the league. Two of them are Franck Kessié—successfully banished from the squad, as a way of pressuring him into finalizing a switch away—and Dembélé himself, who virtually definitely has performed his last sport with the crew. What’s left after these two is actually simply sufficient gamers to fill a beginning lineup. It is because Barcelona is simply too broke to register the remaining gamers whose contracts are already on the books, together with a number of holdover members of the primary crew who signed extensions, in addition to all three of the first-team gamers (Romeu, Ilkay Gündogan, Iñigo Martínez) the membership has bought on this switch window.
All of which is to say that Barcelona has no enterprise even flirting with different golf equipment’ name-brand gamers. Its home is burning down and falling over and sinking right into a swamp, and it is out right here purchasing for brass fixtures. At a sure level even the home’s most loyal inhabitants will be anticipated to depart.
About that. You might need famous that the listing of registered gamers consists of Dembélé, regardless of his having agreed to a switch to PSG underneath a contract provision compelling Barcelona’s acceptance. Why is he nonetheless a Barcelona participant right now, as of this writing, with Barcelona’s gamers actually proper now taking the pitch to face Tottenham Hotspur within the preseason Joan Gamper Trophy sport?
It is as a result of Barcelona’s executives are refusing to signal the paperwork till Dembélé agrees to offer the membership greater than the contractually agreed-upon half of the agreed-upon €50 million. Like a deadbeat ex refusing to signal the divorce papers to finish a long-dead marriage. They even referred to as him in to take part in coaching this week, in hopes that the pettiness and awkwardness of this would possibly both persuade him to relent or immediate him to refuse—which could give the membership some grounds to claw again more cash.
Possibly they nonetheless imagine any such shit cannot meaningfully hurt the membership’s fame with the grade of gamers they nonetheless need to pursue. Or possibly they’re simply too broke and determined to care about that anymore.
