5 times clubs massively overpaid for players

#2 Ousmane Dembele - £97m to Barcelona, 2017

Barcelona may have jumped the gun by paying so much money for Ousmane Dembele

Perhaps the transfer fee that Barcelona paid to Borussia Dortmund for young French attacker Ousmane Dembele last summer – a monstrous £97m or thereabouts – will be just considered a sign of the massive inflation of transfer fees in general at some point in the future. Right now though, regardless of Dembele’s talents, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than to say Barcelona paid way too much for him.

The fee made Dembele the second-most expensive player in football history at that point, behind only Neymar Jr – who was sold by Barcelona to Paris St. Germain a few weeks prior to Dembele’s move. When you consider the more proven players who moved for less money, even that summer – Romelu Lukaku, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang for instance – it’s hard to justify £97m for a 21-year old prospect who’d played one season in the Bundesliga and had scored 10 goals in 49 appearances.

The jury is out on Dembele at Barcelona right now as his debut season was badly curtailed by injuries – a hamstring problem troubled him and kept him out for swathes of games, reducing him to just 17 appearances in La Liga – but even when he was fit, he didn’t look like a player worth his massive fee. And he hardly lit up this summer’s World Cup either even as France won the tournament.

Dembele could deliver the goods yet – at just 21 he’s still got plenty of time on his side – but if he can’t come good in 2018/19 then he could go down as one of the most expensive flops of all time – and perhaps the best ever example of a club overpaying for a player.