Fulham failed in an audacious attempt to bring former forward Moussa Demeble back to Craven Cottage earlier this month, according to reports this afternoon.
Football Insider reports that the Whites were keen to entice Dembele back to England using the carrot of Premier League football, but were simply unable to match the wage package offered by Atletico Madrid. The 24 year-old was formally announced as an Atletico player earlier this week, joining on an initial loan deal that will become a £30m permanent deal in the summer.
Scott Parker has spoken of the importance of bringing in additional forwards during the January transfer, given that he is currently deploying Ivan Cavaleiro as a striker as Aleksandar Mitrovic struggles for both form and fitness. The Fulham boss suggested over the weekend that he wants reinforcements quickly, but the Londoners have only been linked with possible moves for Newcastle’s Dwight Gayle and the Bournemouth striker Josh King.
Fulham’s unlikely pursuit of Dembele, who joined the club on a free transfer from French giants Paris Saint-Germain at the age of sixteen, highlights just how desperate they are to land a reliable striker to power their survival bid. Dembele, who was a regular scorer for the club’s academy sides, eventually went to score 19 goals in 64 senior appearances before joining Celtic for a nominal fee once his Fulham contract expired in the summer of 2016.
To me, this shows the danger of having someone like Tony Khan, who has very little football experience prior to his father investing in Fulham, in such a pivotal position.
The signing of a striker to fit Parker’s new formation who would be ready to step into the first team would transform Fulham’s prospects and arguably make us favourites to survive the drop. We are already halfway through the transfer window and there is no sign of a forward arriving.
To read that we may have spent time trying to lure Moussa Dembele to return – such a fanciful and ridiculous idea – is incredibly infuriating. The stakes in this window are so high, no time can afford to be squandered. We should have had that forward in already; we absolutely must have someone in by the time we play Brighton and WBA.
If only it was that easy Chio, every one wants Forwards . West Ham and Newcastle recently paid big fees for players not good enough. Like we have in past top sides also have. As for Gayle ijuyed more than not now. King recorded not great wants 120 thousand a week
In my view, we should be going for someone like Taiwo Awoniyi or Sirike Dembele, who fits the system and is likely actually available.
Daniel, what chlo is saying is that we were never going to re-sign dembele and the fact that Tony Khan wasted valuable time trying to is why he shouldn’t be in charge of transfers. He has had (at least) the last 6-8 weeks to have been preparing the ground work for getting in a new striker, yet as always it will take too long and will cost us more points
How can anyone say that tony shouldn’t be involved in transfers. He has done deals for Robinson adarabioyo and Tete for just 2 million, when I’d say they are worth 5 times as much as that, not to mention all the magnificent loan signings he’s made such as joa, ademola, Aina, Areola, Lemina. We don’t know the exact the situation with dembele, we don’t know exactly how much time was spent into this deal or of it was even true.
I don’t want to go overboard with this as I’m extremely grateful to the Khan family for continuing to pump extraordinary amounts of money into Fulham and subsidising huge losses year on year, but I struggle to believe that most Fulham fans would agree that Khan junior’s role cannot be questioned.
Just look at the massive failure that was our last season in the Premier League. We still have Seri, Le Marchand and Fabri on our books and there seems to be very little prospect of getting rid of them. Schurrle has retired, Vietto was a huge failure and Mawson is currently on loan in the Championship.
He might have done very well in the summer window but, in my view, he was only rectifying the failure to bring in centre backs as soon as we got promoted.
I don’t whether the Dembele story is true. I’d be amazed if he would even have thought about coming back to Fulham, which seems to be the very point that Chloe was making.