FootBiz newsletter #108: Aston Villa sack Monchi, Ballon d'Or, PL owners meeting

I’ll be honest, I don’t really care about the Ballon d’Or.

I do, however, think that Ousmane Dembele becoming the world’s best player is a good story.

In an era where it feels like the industrialisation of youth football has meant there a fewer non-linear pathways to the absolute top, Dembele has truly been through the highs and lows of football at the top level.

A French youth international, Dembele shone as a teenager at Rennes (where he was compared to Cristiano Ronaldo) before moving to Borussia Dortmund, about the best place a young player could go at this time to develop and experience top-level football.

After just a year in Westphalia, Paris Saint-Germain sent an earthquake through European football by depositing Neymar’s release clause at the Spanish FA headquarters. It was a hostile takeover that, poetically, would only end up being completed thanks to Dembele himself.

As I wrote at the time: “If you do not feel the earth move beneath your feet then you are simply not paying attention.”

Barca were one of the biggest clubs in the world, but an upstart from the French league had just deposited the best part of a quarter of a billion Euros to unilaterally snatch one of the best players in the world from them. The Nou Camp club was stunned. It was panicked.

To try and replace him they needed to make a statement. But much like Tottenham’s spray-and-pray effort to replace Gareth Bale with that world-record fee, Barca also attempted to replace Neymar in the aggregate by signing an elite playmaker, Coutinho, and a talented teenager winger, Dembele.

You couldn’t say they failed insomuch as they won the league for the next two years, and a Copa del Rey to boot, but both players would be considered failures in that they never came close to living up to their fees. Neither even really ever became indisputable starters in the team and both were jeered by their own fans on occasion.

Dembele was too raw at that time. Coming into a team where the expectation is perfection, he was imperfect. Sometimes he was imperfect in ways that still made him a dangerous player, and he flashed glimpses of staggering ability. But often also he was imperfect in ways that made him seem like a poor fit at Barca; mazy dribbles to nowhere and a need to gallop into spaces that didn’t exist in this team.

Then the injuries arrived.

By 2023, Barca were done with him and he was done with Barca. Needing a fresh start, PSG were the perfect match as they looked to replace their failed Galactiques project with a hungry, younger and more French core.

Dembele has since become famous for his endless harrying, his beady eyes wide as he lurks on the edge of the penalty area ready to trigger PSG’s ferocious press. He has become a prolific goalscorer but also a versatile forward, capable of playing through the middle or out wide. He creates with the dribbling ability he always had but also with the link-up play that has become a lot sharper, more deliberate.

Discarded as injury-prone and insufficient, Dembele has bounced back higher than he ever could have reached at Barcelona - to the top of world football.

In truth, I am also a touch surprised that it was him who won.

This award has increasingly become a popularity contest in recent years as they have gradually changed how it was adjudicated, or “bastardised and made trashy by those who run the game” (per Miguel Delaney of The Independent).

If you view the award as whoever was the best footballer in the world last year, Dembele is a fair argument. But the reality is that you usually have to be the best (or most important) footballer on a team that wins the biggest trophy of that season (Champions League, Euros, World Cup or some combination thereof).

If you view it simply as who is the most talented footballer on Earth I would find it hard not to argue for Lamine Yamal. When PSG won the Champions League, it became a question of which of their players would win it.

But honestly, who cares? Well, apart from Real Madrid?

Rather than a red carpet gala I’d prefer to be watching Le Classique, which for reasons you can find out below, was also on last night….

Table of Contents

• PL owners meeting today

• Villa sack Monchi

• Lewis out, Garlick new Arsenal CEO

• West Ham consider Nuno

• DC United hire agent as MD

• Ligue 1 drama

• San Siro vote on the agenda

• Fire move ahead with stadium plans

• Salford City in “serious trouble” until £25m raise

• Barca’s salary limit slashed