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A former favourite at Camp Nou admits that the big-money signing still has plenty to prove, with it up to him to show that he can handle the pressure
Ousmane Dembele must pass “a final exam” at Barcelona if he is to prove himself and justify a €105 million transfer fee, says Xavi.

The France international winger was acquired from Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2017 with the funds generated by the record-breaking €222m sale of Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain.

He arrived with a blossoming reputation, with the 20-year-old considered to have plenty of potential still to be unlocked.

An injury-ravaged start to his time at Camp Nou has, however, hindered Dembele’s cause and prevented him from making the desired impact, with Xavi conceding that he still has plenty of questions to be answered.

The Blaugrana legend told So Foot: “He will need some time. Barca is like a final exam for a footballer. It is like Dembele is passing a Master's degree right now because not everyone can play for this club.

“Why? Because you have to know things three times more than elsewhere. Barca play on barely 30 metres of the pitch.

“Dembele has a lot of talent, he is very fast, but here, he is not going to have the space he had at Dortmund or Rennes. He had more space, so more time there.”

Pressed on what Dembele must do to fit the Barca mould, Xavi added: “He will have to learn to think faster, in a few thousandths of a second. This is where we will see if he has the mentality.

“He must say to himself: ‘l am a Barca player’. You have to be mentally strong, to have conviction.

“There are average players who spent 15 years at Barca, because they had character. And there are some excellent players who did not do anything because they couldn't handle pressure.

“In training, when you saw them, you would say to yourself: ‘They will break everything. They're going to be legends’. But no. As soon as they entered the pitch, their legs started shaking, they did not want the ball anymore. And you would wonder: ‘Holy f***, what's happening to ==>
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Discussing cities is like talking about the knots in a net: they’re crucial, but they’re only one part of the larger story of the net and what it’s supposed to do. It makes little sense to talk about knots in isolation when it’s the net that matters.


The 100 million city: is 21st century urbanisation out of control?
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Cities are part of the system we’ve invented to keep people alive on Earth. People tend to like cities, and have been congregating in them ever since the invention of agriculture, 10,000 or so years ago. That’s why we call it civilisation. This origin story underlines how agriculture made cities possible, by providing enough food to feed a settled crowd on a regular basis. Cities can’t work without farms, nor without watersheds that provide their water. So as central as cities are to modern civilisation, they are only one aspect of a system.

There are nearly eight billion humans alive on the planet now, and that’s a big number: more than twice as many as were alive 50 years ago. It’s an accidental experiment with enormous stakes, as it isn’t clear that the Earth’s biosphere can supply that many people’s needs – or absorb that many wastes and poisons – on a renewable and sustainable basis over the long haul. We’ll only find out by trying it.

‘Right now we are not succeeding’ … an aerial view of houses in Florida.
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‘Right now we are not succeeding’ … an aerial view of houses in Florida. Photograph: Alamy
Right now we are not succeeding. The Global Footprint Network estimates that we use up our annual supply of renewable resources by August every year, after which we are cutting into non-renewable supplies – in effect stealing from future generations. Eating the seed corn, they used to call it. At the same time https:///1QWD4g