Demba Ba (39) on his new career as Director of Football: ‘’I’ve always wanted to do things my way’’

As a Director of Football, Ba is responsible for the head of operations, the development of the club, and the players, staff and infrastructure. It’s a challenging role, but he’s enjoying his new life. ‘’I’ve always wanted to do things my way. And the easy way to do things my way was to figure out how I can partner with someone so we can buy a club and implement all the ideas that I wanted to do,’’ Ba said to TransferRoom.

In the end, Ba found that partner in Yüksel Yildirim. The 39-year-old joined the club first as an advisor before taking the role of Director of Football. ‘’It’s very different from playing football. When you’re a football player you are in charge of one company, which is your own. And now you have to manage many different companies, because the players are their own companies. It’s a big management job, but I love it.’’

Becoming sustainable

Ba’s goal is to make Dunkerque a sustainable football club that, first of all, won’t rely on an owner who spends crazy amounts of money every year on bringing in new players. With France’s TV rights crisis, it also isn’t the right time to spend loads of money. Instead, Ba’s goal is to develop footballers and add value to them, so that they can eventually sell those players to bigger clubs. ‘’All the money that we are going to cash in is going to be reinvested to make sure that we are sustainable.’’

In the long term, Ba wants Dunkerque to be a club that can also buy players, rather than being a club that only sells. He also strives to create an image of a club that is human values. 

Ba’s current role comes with a lot of challenging aspects. The most challenging part according to the former footballer is managing the players. ‘’I always tell them as a joke, ‘I hope I was not like you’, haha. Football players are all looking at their careers, which is normal. And then you’re looking at the overall picture and what you see is not what they see. So my way of managing them, and this is probably the hardest, is to try and bring them on my seat so they can have the same point of view as I do. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to change what they think, but at least they might understand more how I deal with certain situations.’’

Managing a different generation

He also makes great efforts to protect the players’ mental state in this current day and age. ‘’I am born in the 1980s, but I feel more resemblance in my way of being with the generations of the 1970s than the generation of the 1990s. So with the new world and the smart devices and the social media, where everything is open, it makes it a little bit more challenging. I’m trying to focus on the well-being of the players. I’m trying to focus on having them balanced emotionally, because with everything that is happening in the world and on social media, a small thing becomes huge. And if you cannot change the world out there, you need to make sure that you reinforce yourself, because when criticism comes, you need to stay strong.’’