feggydinho
Senior Member
Two things to keep in mind here. One, Xavi has built the entire team's attack on pass the ball to Dembele and inshallah. It would be pretty surprising if he didnt' have a decent number of assists and shots. Second, I think we can all agree La Liga is piss poor right now. He will do enough against most teams in La Liga and be our man. That's also why I'm never in on the match threads asking for him to not play - I think we have nobody better and he has to play.
However, the point remains that against the better teams, we cannot trust him to be decisive. You will get maybe 1 chance against a top team and you need a player who will make the best use of that chance. Whether we score or not is a different discussion - but you have got to make the right decision. Dembele has shown in all his time here that he will always be inconsistent and never be the guy who we can rely on against top teams.
Couple that with his incredibly loose losses in possession and what you have is an asset that you can sell and replace with someone cheaper, and it wouldn't make a huge difference to our results. We'd still win most La Liga games, and we'd still probably lost against the top teams. If that replacement turns out to be better than we hope/expect, well, that's great. But we cannot be clinging on to a guy this expensive, both in terms of real as well as opportunity cost, with the misguided notion that we need to get another superstar before we can replace him because a) we cannot afford anyone and b) we don't need a superstar, just someone who has half a brain.
The team's attack isn't built around Dembele, if it was then Xavi won't be playing him on the lw sometimes to accommodate Raphinha cause that results in Dembele having limited impact in games, but we saw that even against Madrid this season. I'd say that people use this statement ("attack built around Dembele") as an excuse for him performing better than other forwards apart from Lewa this season.
Xavi's style is to play through the wings and have the wingers combine with their respective wingbacks. Now when Ferran is combining with Alba, you have Dembele or whoever at the rw making runs into the box and if Dembele is combining with his wingback you have the attackers on the other end making runs into the box but Dembele is better at creating chances, plus we not having a great rb too so you see Ferran or Fati making more runs and Dembele having to create chances but it's not always like that, like against Almeria the ball was played mostly through the lw, with Ferran and Alba having far more touches than Dembele and you could see him making runs into the box in that game.
He'll probably leave soon (maybe better for both parties), but my point is that he isn't the main problem in our attack so I don't get why people are making it seem that way.