This is part of a series of articles examining the impact of the five most expensive footballers. For an overview of the rules guiding this (unscientific) study and the players being examined, please see the introductory article.
Remember that question I asked at the outset: “If a player has been involved in several high-value transfers, this player must be worth the money, right?”
A part of the 2018 World Cup-winning France squad, Masour Ousmane Dembélé has been involved in three transfers over the course of his professional football career, only one of which meets our evaluation criteria. So let’s get right to it.
Dembélé to Barcelona (€135m): 2017 to 2023
Flush with cash from their sale of Neymar to PSG, Barcelona went on a spending spree during the 2017/18 season in a bid to try and compensate for the loss of a key attacking player, signing 7 players for a combined total of just over €375m.
As part of their outlay, Barcelona spent €135m to acquire the services of Dembélé, a player whose professional experience up to that point was limited to TWO seasons.
No, that was not a typo.
For some inexplicable reason, the higher-ups at Barcelona thought that it would be a good idea to spend €135m on a player whose career up to that point could be expressed in the following statistics:
- 58 league games (26 in 2015/16 at Stade Rennais, 32 in 2016/17 at Borussia Dortmund)
- 18 league goals (12 in 2015/16, 6 in 2016/17)
- 18 league assists (5 in 2015/16, 13 in 2016/17)
To put those figures into context, Neymar, the player Dembélé was ostensibly brought in to replace, had more goal contributions in the 2015/16 season alone (40 contributions; 24 goals and 16 assists) than Dembélé had in his entire professional career.
Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?
You and I might think so but the decision-makers clearly didn’t. Maybe they saw something beyond just basic statistics. Maybe they saw a player with abundant potential who would help deliver success to the club for many years to come, in which case, the money spent would end up being a bargain, if ever you could call €135m a bargain.
Well, how did things turn out? Did Dembélé, after agitating for the transfer, prove to be a success at Barcelona?
| Season | League Position | League Points (Max 114) |
|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 (without) | 1 | 91 |
| 2016/17 (without) | 2 | 90 |
| 2017/18 (with) | 1 | 93 |
| 2018/19 (with) | 1 | 87 |
| 2019/20 (with) | 2 | 82 |
| 2020/21 (with) | 3 | 79 |
| 2021/22 (with) | 2 | 73 |
| 2022/23 (with) | 1 | 88 |
| Avg 85.36 |
(While the 2023/24 season would be considered in the above data, it is still ongoing and has thus been omitted.)
Dembélé’s debut season saw the club instantly improve on their second-place finish from the previous season, finishing as champions. One highlight of the season was the points total of 91, which was the club’s highest since the 2014/15 season.
Not a bad way to start your time at a club.
The 2018/19 season saw more success come to Barcelona in the form of yet another title-winning campaign. While the points total was slightly lower (90 vs 91), that didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
There’s a proverb which, when translated, says that a good day is seen in the morning. If his first two seasons were anything to go by, it seemed, then, that Dembélé’s time at the club would be extremely fruitful.
Sadly, however, this proved to be something of a false dawn.
Two of the subsequent three seasons saw Barcelona hit unwanted lows. For two seasons running, 2020/21 and 2021/22, the club finished their league campaign with fewer than 80 points. Before the 2020/21 season, the last time the club had failed to reach 80 points was during the 2007/08 season, when the club earned a third-place finish with 67 points.
But in a testament to the club’s bouncebackability, Barcelona won the league during Dembélé’s last season at the club.
What of Dembélé, though? What role did he play during this six-year period?
| Season | Club League Goals | Goals | Assists1 | % Contribution2 | Match Winners3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 (without) | 112 | 0 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 |
| 2016/17 (without) | 116 | 0 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 |
| 2017/18 (with) | 99 | 3 | 7 | 10.10% | 0 |
| 2018/19 (with) | 90 | 8 | 4 | 13.33% | 3 |
| 2019/20 (with) | 86 | 1 | 0 | 1.16% | 0 |
| 2020/21 (with) | 85 | 6 | 3 | 10.59% | 2 |
| 2021/22 (with) | 68 | 1 | 13 | 20.59% | 0 |
| 2022/23 (with) | 70 | 5 | 7 | 17.14% | 4 |
As I mentioned earlier, Barcelona really did miss Neymar after he left. The number of goals scored by the club decreased by 48 between 2016/17 and 2021/22, with the bulk of that decrease coming between 2016/17 to 2017/18 and 2020/21 to 2021/22.
Sadly, the player who was brought in to replace Neymar didn’t have the sort of impact that many would no doubt have hoped for. Dembélé’s impact on the team was so negligible, in fact, that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Barcelona won most of their league titles in spite of Dembélé. Why do I say that?
While this analysis isn’t by any means scientific, consider the following:
- During the 2017/18 season, Dembélé scored 0 match winners.
- While Dembélé scored 3 match winners during the 2018/19 season, if one were to take away the 9 points earned, Barcelona would still have won the league.
- The 2022/23 is the only season in which Dembélé had a meaningful contribution to the team’s success. Taking away the 12 points he earned would have left Barcelona in third place behind Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid.
Despite the role he played in the club’s success in 2022/23, Dembélé’s overall statistics don’t make for very cheerful reading. The only season in which he had any figure in the double digits was the 2021/22 season, when he assisted 13 goals, on the way to an overall contribution of 20.59%. The rest of the seasons saw a very underwhelming return.
During his six years at the club, he scored a grand total of 24 league goals, assisting a further 34, giving us an average of 4 goals and 5.67 assists a season.
For comparison, this total of 54 is slightly less than half of Neymar’s return of 117 in four years at the club; he scored a total of 68 goals, assisting 49.
One point to note regarding the above is that Dembélé was injured for most of the 2019/20 season, playing a total of 356 minutes spread out over 5 matches. Would he have had a chance to contribute more to the team’s chances had he stayed fit? Most definitely.
Reflecting on this transfer, can we say that it was a success? Surprisingly, yes. In a way.
During his time at the club, Dembélé lifted a total of 7 trophies:
- 2 x Spanish Cup (2017/18, 2020/21)
- 2 x Spanish Super Cup (2018/19, 2022/23)
- 3 x Spanish League (2017/18, 2018/19, 2022/23)
And yet, given his individual contributions, can we really say that Barcelona got value for the €135m spent?
Quick aside: Of the 6 other players who joined Barcelona along with Dembélé, including fellow €135m kid, Philippe Coutinho, precisely ZERO of them are still at the club.
Dembélé, for his part, got a pretty sweet deal.
He got to lift a few trophies and at the end of it all, got another big-money transfer. In the summer of 2023, he left Barcelona to join PSG for €50m. A few days after Dembélé joined, PSG sold Neymar to Al-Hilal. Funny how life works, isn’t it?
And with that, we’re left with one more player to consider.
Stick around for that. And take care.
Footnotes
For a basic understanding of what constitutes an assist, see this Wikipedia page. ↩
”% Contribution” is the total number of goals and assists contributed by a player expressed as a percentage of the total goals scored by the team. ↩
To best understand the idea behind a match-winning goal, consider the following examples:
- In a match that ends 1-0, the match winner is, obviously, the only goal.
- In a match that ends 2-0, the match winner is the first goal.
- In a match that ends 4-2, the match winner is the third goal scored by the winning team.
In cases where points earned by a player are calculated, only the match winners are considered. Points earned in a draw are NOT factored in. ↩