As the transfer window enters its endgame there has been a familiar sub-plot over the last few days, another chapter in the ballad of Ousmane Dembélé.
This is the strangest of sporting lives. Dembélé is only 24. He joined Barcelona for £96m as long ago as August 2017, one of several deals that were steroid-fed by the state of Qatar’s inflationary lust for Neymar.
In the years since Dembélé has essentially become a prisoner of money. Barcelona can’t afford to keep him. Nobody else wants him on those ruinous terms. His career has dissolved into a kind of gilded stasis, a thing that only really comes alive as the biannual sub-industry of failing to sell Ousmane Dembélé cranks into gear.
John Terry remov…