Four and half years after Ousmane Dembele became the most expensive purchase in Barcelona’s history, the club’s president Joan Laporta declared the winger “better than Mbappe”.
Laporta – who had not been in charge when Dembele, then 20, joined for an initial €117 million from Borussia Dortmund – smiled at his audience of reporters as he made the remark.
He knew, speaking in early December 2021, he was making a big claim and the statement masked a long, complicated relationship between Barca and a player whose great potential had too often been very far from his day-to-day reality.
The Dembele-Barca saga has never run smoothly for long, and its latest sharp twists and turns were being played out on Monday between the US, where Barca are on a pre-season tour, the club’s Catalonia offices, and Paris, where the names Kylian Mbappe and Dembele were being bracketed together again, this time by Paris Saint-Germain as the French club contemplated the exit of their own restless superstar.