Anyone looking for football’s next Moneyball success story could do a lot worse than train their attention on a sleepy club on the north coast of France currently being transformed by a Premier League icon.
Demba Ba forged a fearsome reputation by being sharp in front of goal during stints with West Ham, Newcastle United and Chelsea. But it is his ownership acumen that is making waves at USL Dunkerque, one of the smallest clubs in France’s ultra-competitive Ligue 2.
It is approaching two years since Ba and business partner Robert Yuksel Yildirim, a Turkish shipping magnate, acquired the club.
A minority owner, Ba subsequently took over as head of football operations and went about transforming the club, firing a popular manager and changing the club’s philosophy to become more focused on youth development.
His particular USP is training the brain. Ba really believes in the power of psychology and cognitive development, investing precious club funds in infrastructure to support players’ mental health.
It is a blueprint honed by four years of meticulous research, firstly by regular trips to Moscow to learn from mentor Ralf Rangnick and then traversing the globe to visit innovative clubs, cherry picking the best bits from them while undertaking original work to track trends in the modern game.
It gave him, he says, a “unique perspective on where football is going in the next few years”.
Marry that innovative approach with a whip-smart recruitment policy – they have utilised the loan market superbly in the last 12 months – and you can see why Ba is feeling upbeat when The i Paper catches up with him.
He does not want to jinx it unduly but so far his approach seems to be working.
On Monday night they defeated Caen to move back up to fourth in the league, maintaining an unlikely promotion push given they are operating with the 14th biggest budget in the 18-team league.
Last week they made it into the last eight of the French Cup after upsetting Champions League club Lille in a thrilling penalty shoot-out win.
It is an impresssive turnaround given last season was mostly spent battling relegation.
Promotion to the league of Paris Saint-Germain and company feels unthinkable for a club where attendances hover around the 3,500 mark.
“I’m very happy with how it is going,” Ba tells The i Paper.
“Our success this season is simple. It’s having a plan – a proper plan – and putting the right people in place to deliver it.”
Ba backed himself when others would not.
Brexit red tape robbed him of a job as adviser to Rangnick during his interim spell at Manchester United and there was an opportunity at Marseille but English clubs generally showed lukewarm interest.
Perhaps, looking back, that has been a good thing – allowing him to go in at a club where his methods have not met with resistance and test them.
“I studied football a lot. I looked at management, trends of football and where the game is going and then had the conviction to put all of that in place,” he says.
“I always said you don’t need the biggest budget to create a great team in football. It’s all about having the idea, the vision and putting it together with the right people. For me I focused on that.
“Capital will always take you further, but you can have the biggest budget and no idea what you’re doing. You’re still going to be able to do something because if you go into the market with £10m as opposed to £1m you might get a better player.
“At the end of the day it all starts by the vision, planning and getting the right people on board. This is what’s happened with Dunkerque, this is what I think I do well.”
He is fresh off one of the “greatest nights in Dunkerque’s history”, a cup win over Lille achieved by staying true to a possession-based playing philosophy that requires bravery from the club’s young players.
Ba is full of praise for Luis Castro, his coach, and reels off the age of those who achieved it. Most are under 21. One was playing his first professional game while another had only inked a loan deal from Saudi Arabia the day before.
“Amazing, amazing, they showed so much mental strength,” he says. It gives them fresh impetus in a promotion challenge where Ba insists the pressure is off.
“The teams that are above us, they have four times the budget we have. You take the captains of all those four teams, their wages probably cover our entire budget. That’s what we’re fighting against.
“But we have a good strategy, good quality, good chemistry and a really good coaching staff. We’re fighting. We’re not obligated to go up, we’re just playing, enjoying our games, enjoying our games philosophy.
“For now it’s just taking joy and pleasure in what we do and trying to win as many games. The pressure isn’t on our side.”
The next step? Ba is hopeful of forging closer links with teams in England, perhaps even informal partnerships with willing clubs.
It has been difficult so far. Dunkerque’s budget means they can’t bring huge financial incentives to the table and the multi-club model adopted by an increasing number of Europe’s heavyweights shuts some doors to even well-connected former players.
“I’ve certainly tried to forge those links in England,” he says.
“It’s not as easy as I would have thought because the way I see football requires a lot of cognitive qualities and a lot of technical qualities and abilities.
“Most of the time when you find those players they’re with big teams or their value is so high and those teams are struggling, right now, to loan a player to Dunkerque.
“Although we’re doing good in the second division it’s not like we’re FC Metz, Bordeaux or Lorient where they used to be first division, they are big names and have big money.
“But I’m trying. Last season we did Billy Koumetio on loan from Liverpool, now we’ve done [Abdoullah] Ba from Sunderland.
“We’re trying to open doors and make those connections but as of now, all we’ve managed to do is to loan those players, we’ve not been able to sign those players yet. Let’s see what happens.”
Ba is, though, planning talks with the hierarchy at former club Newcastle about how they can link up in the future, attempting – possibly – to utilise his knowledge of the Magpies to forge a mutually beneficial arrangement for players with the right profile.
He may be pushing at an open door. Newcastle are in the process of re-organising their loans department, adding staff and know-how to a team that is seen as a vital cog in the player development process.
With the Magpies stepping up their recruitment drive of project players in a Paul Mitchell-driven initiative, they are actively looking for clubs to work with. Could they entrust some of those rough diamonds to Ba and his team?
“For Newcastle, I have plans,” he says.
“It’s a club that counts for me, it counted in my career and in the next few weeks and months I’m going to make my way up north and see what we can do together.
“I will pay Newcastle a visit, it’s on my list absolutely.”
Ba is delighted at the success his former club has enjoyed since the 2021 takeover of the club. He reserves particular praise for Eddie Howe, a manager that Rangnick had identified as a candidate for Spartak Moscow in 2020.
“What I like about Eddie is his calmness on the sideline,” Ba says.
“The last thing you need as a football player is stress. He’s not emotional or affected by a player missing a chance or the opposition team scoring a last-minute goal. That takes a lot of stability.
“The way he sets up the team and the project, it’s great. He’s definitely someone that is there for the long-term and I think he brings that to Newcastle if they stay.”
It is Newcastle’s rivals Sunderland who might have done him the biggest favour in Dunkerque’s promotion charge, though. A loan deal for Abdoullah Ba, a regular starter for the Black Cats last year but now out of favour, was a coup for the club.
“He’s a player that I’ve been following for a long time,” he says.
“He was playing for Le Havre before and I grew [up] there so I’ve always followed that club a little bit and his name is Ba. When I saw him at 17 or 18 I really liked the profile of the player that he was.
“He did well for Le Havre, went to England and then I saw he wasn’t playing too much this season. But I know the player, it’s just a little click that needs to happen in his mind for him to be able to perform because once again I know the quality of the player.
“When you see his attributes, it’s unbelievable. The agility he has with the ball, his mentality and even the speed and everything. If you train hard, with all these attributes you have a great career unless something’s not right I would say mentally, emotionally or something like this.
“I decided to bring him on board because he’s better than the level of French second division. We’re going to work on the mental aspect, the emotional aspect to get him back on track.”
There is, he admits, “virtually no chance” of making the deal permanent. Sunderland are paying a hefty chunk of his wages to facilitate the deal so the aim is get his career back on track and for him to return to Wearside a happier player and more valuable asset.
“We just want to put him back on track for him to find his rhythm back, his confidence and to start enjoying it a bit because after what happened to him in the last couple of months he got into a mood where he just wants to enjoy football,” Ba says.
“We’ll try and bring that back to him and then hopefully he can go back to Sunderland and either compete or be sold to move on with the rest of his career.”
It is a player-first philosophy that appears to be reaping rewards.
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