Barcelona Beware: Old Boy Dembele On A Mission For PSG In Champions League Clash

Paris, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Apr, 2024) Most of the attention in Paris Saint-Germain's Champions League quarter-final with Barcelona on Wednesday will be on Kylian Mbappe, but Ousmane Dembele is also set to have a big role to play for the French club against his former side.

Mbappe, who is expected to be coming up against Barca in a Real Madrid shirt next season, has 39 goals for PSG in this campaign. Dembele has only one.

However, the player described by newspaper Le Parisien last week as a "tearaway" offers something different, even if Barcelona are all too aware of what the 26-year-old winger can do with a ball at his feet.

The France star returned to his home country last August after six seasons in Catalonia, with PSG paying a reported 50 million Euros ($54.3m) to sign him on a five-year deal.

That relatively paltry sum in the modern transfer market for a world-class player corresponded to the amount of his release clause at cash-strapped Barca.

Moving to Paris allowed the Normandy native to team up with Luis Enrique, who he said had previously wanted to sign him when Dembele was breaking through at Rennes.

"PSG had been interested in me for a long time.

The first contact was when I was at Dortmund, but at that time my objective was to play for Barcelona," Dembele told sports daily L'Equipe earlier this season.

He admitted leaving Barcelona had not been an easy decision after he flourished under the management of Xavi Hernandez towards the end of his time at the Camp Nou.

"These were my two best years, with a coach who showed confidence in me. But I wanted to sign for PSG. It was more to do with Paris changing my mind than it simply being about quitting Barcelona."

And so fate has dictated that he, like Luis Enrique, will get to come up against Barcelona in this season's Champions League quarter-finals.

Dembele was in a Barcelona shirt the last time the clubs met, in the last 16 in 2021, when Mbappe scored a lethal hat-trick in the first leg in Catalonia.

Their previous encounter was the notorious last-16 tie in 2017, when a Barca side coached by Luis Enrique overturned a 4-0 deficit in the first leg to win 6-1 in the return.

A humiliated PSG exacted revenge in August of that year by signing Neymar Junior from Barcelona, paying the 222 million euros needed to activate his release clause.