Ousmane Dembele: A footballing lesson
Ousmane Dembele has been one of the best footballers in the world this season and in my eyes should be one of the Ballon d’Or favourites. 46 g/a in 49 games for PSG is absolutely outstanding but it makes you forget what the public perception of Dembele was before the 2024/25 campaign begun…
Before this season, the Frenchman was viewed very differently by the majority of football fans. His time with Rennes and Dortmund got people very excited and many saw him as one of the most promising players in world football. He had everything a winger needed: both-footed, brilliant close control, blistering pace and a wicked final ball - the boundaries were endless. So, it was very surprising to see his big-money move at Barcelona fail so spectacularly. Dembele was riddled with major injuries which meant he was never able to string consistent minutes together and when he did get on the pitch, most of his performances were pretty unremarkable.
I must say, Dembele had short spells where he looked like his Dortmund self but they were few and far between. The winger quickly fell from an out-and-out star to an ‘on his day’ player, which is a dangerous category to be in. This followed suit at PSG where in his first season, it’s fair to say he didn’t rip up any trees. People who had been following Dembele for a while had hoped that the move back to France, playing for easily the best team in the country - would see him get back to his best and yet it was nowhere to be seen. Many fans, including myself - began to think that Dembele was now slowly becoming a ‘failed wonderkid’ and it was devastating to witness.
From 2017, where Dembele joined Barcelona, to the 2023/24 season - whenever you watched the Frenchman, you would be left with an air of frustration. Dembele would show flashes of his brilliance with a terrific piece of skill or showcase of his dribbling but would finish it off with a disastrous final ball or wayward shot that was close to sailing out the stadium. His decision-making was rash and many began to doubt if he had the match intelligence to ever really make it to the very top of football. When the whole world was watching the World Cup Final against Argentina in 2022, Dembele was comfortably the worst player on the pitch and didn’t even make it to the second-half as he was hooked off in the 40th minute by Deschamps. The confirmation bias amongst many fans reigned supreme: Dembele just wasn’t good anymore.
But if you fast-forward to this season and in particular, this calendar year - and it’s like watching a different player. Even at the beginning of this year’s campaign with PSG - Dembele started slowly, to the point where Luis Enrique dropped him from the squad entirely, against Arsenal in the Champions League group stages after he was late to training.
But from this incident, everything changed. Dembele came back to the PSG starting eleven with a vengeance and also a new position to his name. Enrique was now utilising him as a false 9 with a license to roam wherever he pleased and the Frenchman never looked back. Since then, he has been one of the best players in the world and for me, it was his performances in the Champions League final against Inter that showed just how far he has come.
The Dembele of old was rash and mistake-prone - for every great action he performed, there were 2 or 3 dismal pieces of play which you’d be forgiven for laughing at. Dembele yesterday was the opposite. He wasn’t dribbling for the sake of it or forcing silly shots and passes that were never going to come off. The thing that impressed me the most was the way he was thinking. Dembele was the ultimate team player yesterday, picking up the ball in all areas of the pitch and making the right decision every single time. It was as if you were watching a maestro performing at the peak of his powers, Dembele was effortlessly dropping deep and taking two or three Inter players out of the game with one cute touch or clever pass. Inter’s defenders nor attackers had any answer to his masterful performance yesterday and it solidified that the former Rennes wonderkid had finally hit the heights so many had expected of him nearly 10 years ago. The thing that was always holding him back in years prior - his footballing brain, was now the very thing that was enabling him to thrive at the highest level possible. He has also turned into a true leader, showing how far his mentality has evolved. The press Dembele was performing on Sommer and Inter’s centre-backs was even suffocating me and time and time again you could see him bellowing instructions and encouragement at his teammates, who have come to admire and adore him.
A lot of credit must go to Enrique, who has been the only manager to get the best out of Dembele since 2017 because he has been PSG’s most important and best player through their whole Champions League campaign. 8 goals and 6 assists in 15 games - including 2 assists in the final; a goal and assist in the semi final tie; 2 assists in the quarter finals and the all-important goal against Liverpool which was the only reason they made it through to the next round It’s bad at all and without the Spaniard - it may never have been possible in the first place.
If you were to tell me a year ago that Ousmane Dembele would be one of the frontrunners for the 2025 Ballon d’Or, I would’ve laughed at you. But the French forward has shut me up and he’s shut up 95% of the football fans that had completely written him off as a top player. He has now matured and all of the things about his game that annoyed so many people - are now a thing of the past.
There’s a deeper lesson here, which is that there’s no correct way a player should develop. Development isn’t linear and it never will be. The talent has always been there and it was never going to go away. In this day and age, with social media and what-not exerting so much undeserving pressure on footballers, everyone expects a wonderkid at 19 to only improve with every season. No extended dips in form are allowed or else you’re finished. Before social media took over football discourse, it was commonly accepted that players usually hit their peak at around 26/27 and before then, they’re still not the fully finished product. Dembele is a perfect example of this - no matter the qualities he possessed, he still had poor tendencies and attributes which needed to be ironed out and thankfully, in Luis Enrique he had a coach that gave him the freedom and time to work out how to do so.
In most cases, players aren’t failed wonderkids until they retire. Some need to have the luck of playing in the right league, or in the right team, or under the right coach - do get the absolute best of them. Ousmane Dembele has proved all the doubters wrong, his story is beautiful and it serves as a cautionary tale to everyone that you can never write off players who are just that talented.
