Dortmund Set €40m Floor on Guirassy Amid Fenerbahce Push

Borussia Dortmund have told Fenerbahce to stop asking. Lars Ricken, the club’s managing director for sport, says there is no offer on the table for Serhou Guirassy and no intention of selling, even after the Turkish club’s presidential race turned the Guinea striker into a campaign promise. Any club that wants to talk would first have to clear roughly €40 million ($43 million), and the release clause written into his contract does not cover Fenerbahce at all.

The noise out of Istanbul has been loud for weeks. The contract terms underneath it have not moved an inch, and they are what decide whether this chase goes anywhere.

Ricken Shuts the Door and Names a Number

Ricken used a sit-down with regional German paper WAZ to put the club’s stance on record, and he did not leave much room for interpretation.

We have no offer for Serhou. We also have no intention of letting him go. He has impressively proven his value for Borussia Dortmund over the past two seasons.

That is the public line. The private one carries a price tag. Local German reporting says Dortmund would only sit down to discuss a sale if a bid pushed past the €40 million mark, and even then the board treats the player as someone it would rather keep. For a 30-year-old striker with two years left on his deal, that is a steep opening figure, and it is meant to be. The club is signalling it has no need to sell and every reason to wait.

Fenerbahce, for now, have not lodged a formal bid that meets it. What they have done is talk, a lot, and most of that talk has come from people who, until this weekend, did not yet run the club.

Why the Noise Is Coming From Istanbul

The Guirassy story is really a story about a Fenerbahce boardroom power struggle and its summer election. The club went to an extraordinary vote on June 7, and Aziz Yildirim, who ran Fenerbahce for two decades before stepping aside in 2018, won it back, beating businessman Hakan Safi.

During the campaign both men used transfer targets as currency. Safi told supporters he had tracked Guirassy for a long time and would sign him if elected, telling the Turkish outlet Fanatik: “Whoever wins the election will secure Guirassy. Therefore, God willing, I will sign him.” He also floated names like Luis Suarez and Mason Greenwood. Yildirim took the opposite tone, warning that naming players before deals are done only damages the club’s hand.

Now Yildirim has the job, and the striker promise is his to keep or quietly drop. Speaking after the result, he said he had a striker move in his pocket but had come back “to become champion.” None of that changes the one fact Dortmund control: the terms a buyer has to meet.

The Clause Built to Keep Fenerbahce Out

Guirassy’s contract runs to 2028 and carries a release clause, but it is a narrow one. Reports across German and English media put the figure at around €50 million and, more importantly, restrict it to a short list of elite clubs. Fenerbahce are not on that list, which is why Ricken’s club can name its own number rather than honour a fixed one.

This pricing approach is familiar at Signal Iduna Park. The club extended Felix Nmecha to 2030 while holding a €100 million early-exit price, the same logic of long deals plus high walls that keeps suitors paying full freight. Fenerbahce sit in the bottom row of that table, with the weakest hand of any side linked to the player.

Guirassy’s Goals Give Dortmund the Leverage

The premium only holds because the player keeps scoring. Guirassy arrived from Stuttgart and turned into one of the most reliable finishers in the Bundesliga, and even in a tougher 2025-26 he finished among the division’s top marksmen, behind only Bayern Munich’s Harry Kane and Stuttgart’s Deniz Undav on the 2025-26 Bundesliga scoring charts.

His Dortmund player profile tells the rest. Over two campaigns he has been the focal point of the attack, the kind of centre-forward a Champions League club builds around rather than cashes in. That is the case Ricken makes when he calls the player’s value “impressively proven.”

• 30 years old, under contract until 2028
• 3rd in the 2025-26 Bundesliga scoring charts, behind Kane and Undav
• 2 seasons as Dortmund’s first-choice striker

The age is the one number that cuts the other way. At 30, a €40 million-plus sale this summer may be the last big fee Dortmund can command, and clubs know it. That tension sits underneath everything the board says next.

Where Ole Book Leaves a Gap

Dortmund’s sporting director, Ole Book, has been more candid than the firm headline suggests. He praised the striker without ruling anything out.

With his goals he is very, very important. So it is not our plan and not our premise to say that we want to give him away. Nevertheless, here too: if extraordinary offers come in, one will think about it.

That last line is the opening Fenerbahce are working toward. “Extraordinary” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is Dortmund’s word, not theirs to define. Book has also spoken about keeping the club’s finances disciplined, which is the same reason the €40 million floor exists in the first place.

Before the vote, reports in Turkey claimed the outgoing Sadettin Saran administration had reached a handshake with Dortmund worth around €30 million including bonuses. Dortmund have not confirmed any such agreement, and the figure, if real, sits below the floor the club has set in public.

Yildirim’s Promise Meets a Hard Floor

So the new president inherits a gap, not a deal. On one side is an election promise and a reported €30 million handshake. On the other is a board that will not open talks under €40 million, a clause that excludes the Turkish club, and a manager-level insistence that the striker stays. Bridging that means Fenerbahce pay full price, in cash, to a seller who keeps repeating it has no reason to sell.

Yildirim built his campaign on caution about transfers, then won partly on the strength of a striker pledge. Delivering Guirassy would mean meeting Dortmund entirely on Dortmund’s terms, the exact scenario Ricken set up when he named his number and then said the player was not available anyway.

The German and Turkish windows both run deep into the summer. Until a bid actually clears €40 million, Ricken’s flat refusal is the only official position on the record, and the loudest voices in this saga are still the ones with the least leverage.