According to the latest reports, Tottenham Hotspur’s Moussa Dembele is set to quit the North London side in the next transfer window. The 30-year-old still has one more season left in his contract but is hedging towards a transfer to either Italy or China. Dembele has been able to start in only 20 games out of the league’s 33 this season and has come to realize of the egregious physical demands the Premier League and Mauricio Pochettino’s system puts on him.
The Belgian international is reportedly willing to trade the last year of his Wembley-stay for a more lucrative offer from any of the Chinese outfits. The clubs from the Far East have notoriously been poaching players out of Europe by providing them mind-boggling contracts for significant periods of time.
Carlos Tevez signed with Shanghai Shenhua last summer for a wage fee of £650k-per-week, which turned him into the world’s highest paid footballer, ahead of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Just recently the Atletico Madrid duo, Nicolas Gaitan and Yannick Carrasco signed with the Dalian Yifang for an undisclosed fee.
The Brazilians, Hulk and Oscar have paired up at the final third of Shanghai SIPG and is banking 7-figure sums over a year. Maybe China is the last resort for all the washed up and the retirement-savvy players, filling in the required roles just to make money for three generations down the line.
In the world of sports, it is almost unequivocal to skip over the money aspect of it all which is similar to the entire entertainment business. While some are simply motivated by the green stacks they get to see laid out in front of them, others are motivated to break strides in the biggest leagues and against the best.
Dembele has quite certainly done the latter over the course of his 6-year attachment to the Spurs. He was and has been one of the most underrated players to have ever taken on the Premier League pitches and is quite certainly one of the best.
The amount of pressure he single-handedly takes off his teammates is alone to mark him as one of the greatest holding midfielders of this generation. Dembele has been a massive success under Pochettino and continues to be a key figure in the Spurs lineup.
The Argentine boss has Victor Wanyama, Moussa Sissoko and Harry Winks as backup to the big Belgian but none can quite replicate what he does on the pitch day in day out.
It is only a shame that Dembele could not register a single trophy during his time in England’s top flight and it would be completely fair to start thinking about the rest of his playing career.
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Maybe a move to China would be much more lucrative than that of Italy. The Serie A giants will come nowhere close to what the Asian sides will be able to offer.
