What went wrong for the big Albion sale who has been axed by De Zerbi?

Brighton and Hove Albion FC Football Sport

Yves Bissouma was the high-profile Albion sale which did not come off.

Not for him or for the club who bought him, anyway.

But it certainly worked out okay for the Seagulls.

The Mali and former Lille and Albion midfielder has been released by Spurs four years after they won the race for his coveted signature.

Liverpool and Aston Villa had apparently been keen before that.

The Spurs deal was reported by The Argus as being worth up to £30 million at the time. It was an initial £25 million.

Bissouma’s name was on a list of 11 players released by Tottenham as part of Roberto De Zerbi’s summer rebuild. The other ten were all under-21s.

Albion fans who loved watching the young, emerging and often smiling Bissouma, and who came up with one of their best songs in recent years in his honour, might be surprised to see he will be 30 by the time the summer transfer window closes.

He played a key role in Spurs’ Europa League triumph last year but his time across 111 appearances has been blighted by disciplinary problems.

He was twice embroiled in off-the-field issues and caught publicly inhaling nitrous oxide, which is widely known as laughing gas, on two occasions.

There were two dismissals for second yellow cards in the space of nine games in the first half of the 2023-24 season.

The first of those second yellows came just before half-time at Luton and he also saw a needless red when his side had a game at Nottingham Forest well under control.

Yves Bissouma's move to Spurs did not fully pay off (Image: Simon Dack)

Albion fans watched him concede a penalty to their team in rather rash style in the final game of the 2024-25 campaign.

And he was suspended for a game by then-Spurs boss Thomas Frank last August over repeated lateness.

In that respect, Bissouma has felt like a Peter Pan character in the wrong way. Never growing up.

Albion fans will recall his repeated speeding fines while he was living at Brighton Marina.

It underlines the wisdom of Albion’s decisions to buy and sell at the right times (£13 million from Lille) although any sell-on clause they might have negotiated with Spurs will have been in vain.

Yves Bissouma helped Spurs win the Europa League (Image: Nick Potts/PA Wire)

Bissouma left the club when Albion were just starting to take off under Potter.

And, significantly, when Moises Caicedo had just broken into midfield alongside Alexis Mac Allister.

Potter actually used all three of them together in the final, exciting final weeks of that 2021-22 campaign which saw the Seagulls secure a best-ever ninth place.

Incredibly, he actually managed to get those three plus Pascal Gross and Enock Mwepu into the same XI on occasion, which was some feat of football engineering.

In those weeks and months when he was in the ascendancy, a question about Bissouma was an easy option at Potter’s press conferences.

Remember this was in the days when such events were staged remotely via Zoom.

If your planned question was taken by someone before you, just think on your feet and prompt Potter to say something about the latest Bissouma masterclass or how far he could go.

Speaking in the 2021-22 season, he described Bissouma’s potential as “scary” and added: “The exciting thing for us is he has still got steps to take.

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“We’re proud of what he's achieved but in terms of his distribution and positioning and maintaining the consistency of his highest actions he can still improve.

“The challenge for him is to be the version of himself. He’s made great steps but I think there is even more to come.”

Bissouma is the exception in terms of Albion’s big sales of recent years.

Caicedo, Mac Allister, Marc Cucurella, Ben White and Leandro Trossard are examples of players who have moved on for good money and, in some cases, left room for the next wave to come through.

But there is no denying all of them have gone to develop their careers and enjoy success at their new, richer clubs.

That has not necessarily been the case with head coaches and did not happen with Bissouma.

Yes, he has a European winner's medal, something Albion players do not. But it felt, in 2022, that he would develop more than he has.

His Albion legacies are many of his performances in his 124 appearances, the song (which doesn’t sound quite as good for Kaoru Mitoma), the money he brought in and the stage he left for Caicedo and/or Mac Allister.

At 30, he could be the oldest as yet unfulfilled talent out there on the market this summer.

It is not too late for him to kick on but it feels like Albion – and Potter - got the best of him on the pitch.