Barcelona winger Ousmane Dembele has been struggling with a hamstring injury for the past two-and-a-half months and was oddly seen in Sunderland’s Stadium of Light this week.
The Frenchman, who until recently enjoyed immaculate health since Xavi took over at the Camp Nou, was in attendance on Wednesday night as Sunderland hosted Sheffield United in the Championship – the visiting Blades took home all three points.
Television cameras caught Dembele in the executive box. Sadly, for Black Cats fans, that’s not the case as the once €145 million star is about to complete the most unexpected transfer ever.
As it turns out, Dembele is actually friends with Sunderland chairman and majority owner Kirill Louis-Dreyfus and has been for several years. His visit to Wearside…a social call.
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Louis-Dreyfus is only 25 years old now, but he was 23 when he bought at Sunderland in early 2021. His stake at the time was 41%, but he increased it to a dominant 51% in the summer of 2022.
He was born in Switzerland and comes from the wealthy Louis-Dreyfus family, who have run Louis-Dreyfus since 1851. The French trading company recorded net sales of $49.6 billion in 2021. Kirill is a great-grandson of the company’s founder, Leopold Louis-Dreyfus.
The Sunderland owner, whose father Robert Kahn was CEO of Adidas in the 1990s, attended boarding school in Singapore but later studied at Leeds, while injuries hampered his attempts to become a professional footballer.
He has known Dembele for at least five years, with the duo pictured together as part of a group in Miami in 2018. At the time, Dembele was still relatively new at Barcelona, having completed his move from Borussia Dortmund the year before.
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