France winger Ousmane Dembele, 24, has agreed to a new five-year contract with Barcelona, on reduced terms, and will sign the deal next week. (Sport)
Reportedly it's even a 40-50% reduce in salary. If that proves to be the case, we gotta give credit to Dembele there, especially since his snake of an agent wanted him to leave all along. Now with a better medical team hopefully he stays healthy and fit, would really love it if he could somehow go two full seasons without injuries, would be really interested to see if he could become world class, or at least consistently good in his performances. But two years without an injury is probably wishful thinking, especially when it comes to Dembele, since even players who aren't injury prone (even though Dembele also wasn't injury prone before he came to Barca, so there's hope) almost always can't avoid picking up an injury or two in such a long period of time, even with a proper training and lifestyle regime and world class medical team, which we now hopefully have (again).
When talking about injury free players, another reason to really miss Messi, even in that department he was 'a freak', apart from one or two heavy injuries in his teen years, but after that he never looked back, I can't even remember him being (seriously) injured not even once in his 20s, he was pretty much injury free for the whole decade. The only time I do remember him struggling and being out was the 7-0 aggregate with Bayern in 2013, otherwise he was always fit and playing in those 10 years or so.