BARCELONA – Ousmane Dembélé turns 23 this Friday, passing between doubt and disappointment. Recovering from his umpteenth injury that will keep him away from the fields until August, the French striker has not responded anywhere near to the expectations created when, quickly and running, he signed Barcelona to make Neymar forget. An attractive chrome was needed and no one seemed to cater to the back room of his personality.
The urgency caused Dembélé not to follow in 2017 the protocol that three years before focused on the signing of Ter Stegen, for example, when Andoni Zubizarreta, without so much rush but with equal urgency, was looking for an heir for Víctor Valdés and before giving his approval The German doorman collected reports of all kinds, met him in person and discovered first-hand everything necessary, regardless of whether he was, or was, an excellent doorman.
The result, disastrous until today, of Dembélé invites us to recall, however, the case of another French striker of the first magnitude whose signing Barcelona was overwhelmed and who fell at the last moment due to the bad feelings he transmitted off the pitch . He was called, is called, Karim Benzema and in April 2008, three weeks before Pep Guardiola’s promotion to the first team bench was announced, he had a foot and a half at the Camp Nou.
In a troubled moment, taking the departure of Ronaldinho and Deco for granted and looking for a substitute for Eto’o, whom Guardiola also wanted outside the club, Barça agreed with Olympique de Lyon to sign his young 19-year-old star, that, associated with the great Juninho Pernambucano, he had 30 goals and was seen as a monumental player.
The two clubs agreed on a price of 30 million euros for his transfer and on April 15 the technical secretary Txiki Begiristain traveled to Lyon to meet him in person. He saw the Cup match between OL and Metz live, decided by Benzema, and the next day he met at his house to meet him in private.
From Lyon he called Laporta, the president, advising against signing. Karim, far from showing euphoria for his signing, played the playstation with a friend without hardly attending to a Begiristain unable to attract his attention in a conversation, which led him to sentence that his environment and personal life would cause an adaptation too difficult to Barcelona and Barça.
The club did not want to play with Benzema after knowing him in depth as he had done eight years before, signing Petit in any way to cover, along with Overmars, the departure of Luis Figo or as he later repeated with Dembélé. The rush to add a card with which to cover another was almost never good advisers and today, as in the past, Barça meets a player paid at the price of gold, and with an unbearable salary for many, with whom he does not know what to do.
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