Note to prospective clubs: Doumbia likes honey, flowers, and pollen
Last season I did a brief little blurb on Seydou Doumbia, the Ivorian striker who was absolutely tearing up the Swiss Super League for Young Boys. In fact, according to IM Scouting, he was the best striker in Europe last season: he registered either a goal or an assist every 46.97 minutes on the field. Quick math tells me that that’s almost once a half; it’s probably mostly because he plays in Switzerland, of course, but it’s still pretty impressive.
In fact, it would seem like most people failed to acknowledge Doumbia as the best striker in Europe last season (where’s HIS FIFA Player of the Year award? Messi only did something every 83.83 minutes!). Until, that is, today.
According to FourFourTwo, Swiss newspaper Blick is reporting that Doumbia is sitting right at the top of VfB Stuttgart’s shopping list for January. This is probably because Stuttgart recently underwent a management change, bringing in Christian Gross to replace Marcus Babbel. Last season, Gross was managing at FC Basel; the RottBlau played Doumbia’s Young Boys five times last season, coming away victorious only once and finishing behind them by one point. So it makes sense that Doumbia would be on their radar.
That’s not to say that the move is a done deal, however; far from it. See, Gross is facing competition from an ironic source: one of his former clubs. Tottenham Hotspur is also said to be interested in Doumbia, although his pricetag (an astounding £13.5 million) may have scuttled the deal. Liverpool have also been linked, but that pricetag seems WAY out of their budget.
Another wrinkle: price tags notwithstanding, Doumbia wouldn’t go to any of these clubs. According to Tribal Football, Doumbia would most like to go to Chelsea, where he could play with his idol: fellow Ivorian Didier Drogba, his likely strike partner at the 2010 World Cup.
So, I know its a stretch, but come on Arsene! Open up your wallet for this guy!
I’m kind of thinking that he might not actually be any good once he’s out of Switzerland, to be honest. He’s really fast; outside of that, though, there’s not much going on. Case in point: he scored twenty goals last season in only eight starts, and wasn’t injured. There was a reason he wasn’t starting.
These are the types of guy’s Arsene typically seems to find kinda early if he likes them, Sagna, Adebayor, Eduardo, etc. were all rather unknown till they came on strong for Arsenal. He seems to have a knack for picking out the right guys and I’d think if he rated him as quality there would at least be some small Arsenal link out there about him.
He’s too expensive and too old (he’s 21, well past the point Arsene likes to get a prospect at; his bad habits are already entrenched) for Arsenal, I think.
He’s also only 5’10″; that’s not very big for a guy beind touted as the next Drogba.
Yeah, that price is much too big for Arsene, he’ll spend that on someone proven like Chamakh but I don’t think he’d spend that much on a prospect.
I don’t know if he could succeed in England at that size unless he was on the wings or maybe as a second striker. I always hate the “Next _____” tags guys get simply because they’re from the same country as the other guy, It will be interesting to see how he does in the world cup though.