Khouma Babacar's forgotten Copenhagen chapter

A title, then a vanishing act

When Khouma Babacar signed for FC Copenhagen on 21 January 2022, it looked like a fresh, sensible move for a striker who had spent the previous decade bouncing between Serie A and loan spells in Spain and elsewhere in Italy. He put pen to paper on a contract that was meant to run until the summer of 2025, joining a Danish club in the middle of a title-winning season.

That part worked out. Copenhagen went on to win the 2021–22 Danish Superliga, and Babacar's name sits on the honours list for that campaign. It is the only trophy credited to him in his career record.

The two years nobody talks about

What followed the title is the part of the story that has slipped out of view. Babacar's contract with Copenhagen was not due to expire until 2025, but in August 2024 it was terminated by mutual consent. The reason given was stark in its simplicity: he had not featured for the club in almost two years.

That is the real substance of this spell, not a string of appearances or a goal tally, because there wasn't one to speak of, but a player who had just won a league title effectively disappearing from a matchday squad for the best part of two seasons while still contracted to the club. He arrived mid-title-run, picked up his medal, and then the appearances simply stopped, without the block of information around his career offering any further detail on why.

Bookended by more visible chapters

The Copenhagen years are easy to miss precisely because everything either side of them is so well documented. Before Denmark, Babacar had a proper, traceable career arc: academy football in Thiès, a move to Italy at 14, Pescara, then Fiorentina, where he debuted at 16 years and 10 months old and scored on his first appearance in the Coppa Italia against Chievo. Loan spells followed at Racing de Santander, and later at Sassuolo and Lecce, each with its own line of statistics and context. His best individual season by the numbers came in 2016–17, when he scored ten goals in 22 matches to help his side finish eighth.

After Copenhagen, he moved on to Sarıyer in Turkey's second tier, a return to regular football after the standstill in Denmark.

Why it's worth remembering

A title medal usually signals a career high point, a moment worth dwelling on. For Babacar, the medal from 2021–22 sits awkwardly next to a stretch of near two years without a single appearance for the club that gave it to him. It is not a spell with goals or minutes to recite, but it is a real chapter in a career that otherwise reads as a fairly conventional journeyman's path through Italian and Spanish football. Sometimes the forgotten spell isn't the quiet one nobody noticed at the time, it's the one that ended so abruptly that it never had a chance to be remembered at all.