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The Media’s Latest Story On Karamoko Dembele Is A Clear Case Of Utter Cobblers

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Today, as you’ll be aware, the media is filled with stories about our young teenage prodigy Karamoko Dembele, and of how “lucky” we are that he’s still at Celtic Park. Not content with spending the last few weeks trying to sell him, we’re now being told how fortunate the club is that he’s stuck around this long.

Because he had agreed a move to Barcelona, only for the Catalans to pull out.

Where did this story come from?

It came from a Spanish “newspaper” called Sport. Which is kind of their version of The Daily Record, except that whereas the Record tries to pretend that it’s unbiased whilst clearly promoting the Ibrox cause every chance it gets, Sport makes no such claim; it is, in effect, the “official newspaper of Barcelona fans.” It’s a tabloid, and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. This isn’t Marca we’re talking about here.

According to them, the player was “scouted” during several youth tournaments. Yeah? Under 15 ones? They were, allegedly, ready to make their move last year, but backed off because they feared further UEFA sanctions. Odd that it didn’t stop them, by their own admission, from securing contracts with a nearly mind-bending 77 other players at around the same time, including two who have gone straight into the first team squad, Arturo Vidal and Arda Turan.

The rest have been signed for their youth setup, spread over six tiers and sixteen different academy classes, with age groups ranging from ten upwards.

When you look at that, at the scope of their signing strategy, you can see they clearly weren’t terribly concerned with what FIFA and UEFA were thinking. Are we truly to believe they simply balked when it came to signing a young player in Scotland?

Look, I understand how this story happened. Like every other news organisation these guys need to fill column inches. They latched onto a story about the kid, as it made major headlines throughout football. I don’t blame Sport for running this tale, and it’s not even impossible that Barcelona scouts knew who he was and liked what they saw. But the meat of the story – which according to the hacks here was that he had agreed a deal only for it to collapse over the club not wanting to antagonise the world governing body – is transparent nonsense.

So much so in fact that you have to wonder how much of it was lost – or added – in translation?

That wouldn’t surprise any of us, in the slightest.

But it took me less than five minutes to find out what Barcelona had been up to in the period of time mentioned in the article, five minutes to demonstrate the biggest flaw in the story. That our media could have – but didn’t – do the same is pretty revealing, right?

Lazy journalism? If only.

This is just another way of trying to unsettle this kid.

It is reprehensible stuff.

In the meantime some of the same press outlets are trailing interest in “Sevco wonderkid” Billy Gilmour, allegedly from the same phalanx of top teams.

How do you thing they are reporting that story?

Yes, you’ve guessed it … that in spite of it all, he’d prefer to stay at Ibrox.

You literally could not make this stuff up.

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