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Ryan O’Hanlon
Nine years ago, Ousmane Dembélé was doing what he’s doing now: wrecking Ligue 1. But back then, he was an 18-year-old playing for Rennes.
It was his first season as a pro, and he was on his way to scoring 12 goals and assisting five more in fewer than 2,000 minutes. One particular reporter was baffled in the same way that all of France‘s defenders were.
“Are you right-footed or left footed?” he asked.
“Hmmm,” Dembélé paused. He didn’t even seem to know. “Left-footed.”
“Are you sure? Because you also score with your right foot.”
“Yeah, I’m more left-footed.”
“Don’t you shoot penalties with your right foot?”
“Hmmm,” another pause. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I shoot better with my right foot.”
Nearly a decade later, playing for his fourth team after moving between clubs for a combined €220 million in transfer fees, he lined up for a penalty against Liverpool at Anfield. This time, it looked like was going to use his left foot — before he shuffled to the other side of the ball, stepped up and planted the ball into the upper corner with his right.
Minutes later, PSG became the first team to ever knock Liverpool out of the Champions League after losing the first leg at home. And they did it, in large part, because Dembélé finally fulfilled the promise of that ambipedal teenager who sent France spinning nine seasons ago.
Right now, I’m confident that Ousmane Dembélé is the best soccer player in the world. Here’s why.
Why Dembélé looked like the next Neymar
A year after dizzying defenses across Ligue 1, Dembélé was scooped up by Borussia Dortmund for €35m. This was back before Real Madrid were spending even bigger sums on even more unproven teenagers. The soccer economy worked like such: If you were under, say, 23 years old and had shown world-class promise, you would move to Dortmund for a midrange fee, get tons of playing time for a couple seasons, get to compete in the Champions League and eventually move to one of the biggest clubs in the world once they were ready to slot you into the starting XI.
At Dortmund in 2016-17, Dembélé was just as productive as he was at Rennes. In his age-18 season in France, he averaged 0.76 non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes. In his age-19 season in Germany, he averaged … 0.75 non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes. But it wasn’t just goals and assists.
Unsurprisingly, when nobody, including yourself, knows which foot is your stronger foot, it’s really hard for defenders to stop you. Heck, it was hard enough for defenders to stop Arjen Robben, and they always knew what way he was going. Dembélé is one of the most fluid soccer players you’ll ever see.
Everyone else had a particular set of angles that they relied on — a kind of physiological signature — to move with the ball. Not Dembélé; all 360 angles were always an option, and he then combined that incredible flexibility of movement with world-class explosiveness. He found the defense’s weak point and burst through it — over and over again.
With Rennes, Dembélé completed over five successful take-ons per 90 minutes. Among players with at least 1,200 minutes played across Europe’s Big Five leagues in 2015-16, none completed more. There were only four players who averaged at least 3.5 successful take-ons per 90 and also scored or assisted at a rate of 0.75 or better per 90 minutes. They were Neymar and Lionel Messi at Barcelona, Riyad Mahrez in Leicester City‘s title-winning season and 18-year-old Ousmane Dembélé.
With Dortmund, he was even better. His dribbling numbers declined a bit, but that’s a statistic that peaks at a really young age for most players. In Germany, he still beat 4.5 defenders per 90 minutes off the dribble, still generated goals at the same rate and he also completed 4.7 passes into the box — up from 3.4 with Rennes. The only players in the Bundesliga who completed more were Robben and Franck Ribery for Bayern Munich.
Across the Big Five leagues, there were three players who averaged at least four successful take-ons per 90 minutes and four passes into the penalty area: Messi, Neymar and 19-year-old Ousmane Dembélé.
If we tweak the thresholds, we’re left with this comfy little fact: In the 2016-17 season, only two players in Europe averaged at least 4.5 successful take-ons and 4.5 passes into the penalty area per 90 minutes: Neymar … and the guy who would replace Neymar at Barcelona.
Why Dembélé wasn’t the next Neymar
In the summer of 2017, PSG broke the transfer market by doubling the previous world-record fee and paying Neymar’s €222m release clause. For all of the criticism that we (mostly rightly) give Barcelona for their mismanagement over the past near decade, Dembélé was the right signing to replace him.
At this point, there were three players in the world who were world-class dribblers, world-class passers and world-class goal producers. Dembélé trailed Messi and Neymar in that last category, the most important one, but we have rarely, if ever, seen a teenager do all of the things he had done. And he had done it two seasons in a row. And he had done it in two different leagues.
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Dembélé was as close as you can get to projecting a player to be a Ballon d’Or candidate, and he was so good at so many things that there was very little risk of him being a complete bust. Even if the goals never hit a world-class level, he was still able to push the ball up the field as well as anyone. Now, €135m is an absurd amount of money to pay to simply break a player’s contract, but Dembélé and Kylian Mbappé were the two players you would’ve bet that money on if you had to in 2017.
The main reason it didn’t go well for Dembélé at Barcelona is pretty simple: he rarely played. Some of that is bad luck; some of it, as sources in Europe have suggested, is that Dembélé didn’t have the maniacal my-body-is-a-machine focus that the world’s most robust athletes maintain. Whatever the exact reasons, Dembélé was the fourth-most expensive transfer in the history of the sport, and he only played 44% of the available minutes for Barcelona across his six years with the club from 2017 to 2023.
Across those six seasons, he averaged 0.69 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. That’s not much lower than he averaged before moving to Spain, but it’s still well below what Neymar (0.85) averaged. And it’s nowhere near Messi. Plus, these were some of Dembélé’s peak years. He was supposed to be improving his output — not going backward.
How Dembélé became a false nine and a traditional nine — all at once
Funnily enough, Dembélé eventually replaced Neymar again.
The Brazilian decided to leave PSG and wind down his career with a Saudi Pro League payout last summer. (He’s since voided that contract to return to Brazil, where he’s back where he started at Santos.) Barcelona, meanwhile, were still pulling as many levers as possible in order to replace some of their already good players with players basically just as good, so they allowed Dembélé to move back to France, to PSG, for €50m before the start of the 2023-24 campaign.
In his six seasons with Barcelona, Dembélé scored 24 goals and added 34 assists. Neymar, for reference, put up 68 and 35 across four seasons. Messi had more goal contributions than Dembélé’s 58 total in two different single seasons.
With PSG last year, Dembélé was fine: a ton of ball progression, not a lot of goals and assists, and even less playing time. He scored three goals and assisted eight more in Ligue 1, across just 1,500 minutes. He added two more goals and one assist in 950 Champions League matches.
But then something changed. Well, two things.
First, Kylian Mbappé left for Real Madrid. Given his fits and starts with Real Madrid, we’re learning that Mbappé really is a difficult player to integrate into your system. He likes to play on the wing, but he’s not a high touch player and most of his value comes from what he does off the ball. He also does almost zero work defensively. In other words, he’s a non-pressing striker who doesn’t like to play through the center. Despite an unmatched goal-scoring record at his age, a lot of tactical levers still need to be pulled to make the most out of him.
The second change, though, happened midway through this season. Luis Enrique turned Dembélé into a center forward. Ever since then, PSG have been the best team in the world and Dembélé’s been the best player.
Here’s the heatmap of his touches before Jan. 1:
And here’s what it looks like after Jan. 1:
Since the turn of the year, Dembélé has 18 non-penalty goals in Ligue 1 and the Champions League. No player in Europe has more than 11. And the part that makes Dembélé the best player in the world right now is that he’s scoring all of those goals — and still doing everything he used to do.
He’s completed 43 passes into the penalty area in 2025 — tied for the seventh most among all players, while no one ahead of him has scored more than seven non-penalty goals. And he’s completed 30 take-ons — tied for eighth most among all players.
There’s a desire to refer to Dembélé as a “false nine” because he’s a player who has never previously played center forward who is now playing center forward. But the prototypical false nine is a player who drops deeper and then allows wingers and midfielders to run past him into the box. Dembélé is dropping deeper to facilitate play … and then he’s also running into the box.
We saw it all in his goal against Liverpool. He drops deep to receive a pass to break Liverpool’s press. Then he drives the ball forward, splits the defense with a through ball and then he makes the run into the penalty area to force a mistake and eventually score a goal.
Ousmane Dembélé gives PSG the lead at Anfield but the passes in the build up 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/4vYAPsa3fR
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) March 11, 2025
Dembélé is also one of only five players in Europe to register at least 100 touches in the opposition penalty area in 2025. In other words, he’s in the top 10 for dribbling past players, the top 10 for completing passes into the box and the top 10 for finding space in the box. Oh yeah, and then he’s also nearly lapping the field with his goal scoring.
Somehow, it gets even better, too. Along with Barcelona, PSG are the only other top team who still try to press their opponents off the field from start to finish. Since Jan. 1, PSG and Barcelona are the only teams to reach the Champions League round of 16 who allow fewer than 9.3 passes in their attacking half before attempting a defensive action and have kept their opponents below a pass completion rate of 80%.
We still haven’t really seen Barcelona’s approach pressure tested by a top team outside of Spain, but PSG just absolutely smothered Liverpool over two legs with their press. The tie went to penalties, but the French club were the significantly better team across the 210 minutes. They held Liverpool to their two lowest pass completion rates of the season, and that approach doesn’t work without a front three who actively commit and contribute to a press. In the second leg at Anfield, per Statsbomb data, Dembélé completed 52 pressures: 10 more than any other player.
For comparison, Mohamed Salah made 14 in the same game. And it was really hard to watch those two matches and make the claim that he was even close to the best player on the field. Salah and maybe Mbappe can rival Dembélé’s three-part ability to beat defenders off the dribble, make runs into the box and play killer passes into the penalty area but neither one comes anywhere near putting in the defensive work that Dembélé does.
Few players have ever had better seasons than the one Salah is currently having. And that’s how we judge these things. Dembélé has played around 63% of PSG’s minutes in all comps — his highest rate since the 73% he played with Dortmund eight seasons ago. There are real questions as to whether he can keep this up because, well, we’ve never seen him keep it up.
But for at least two-plus months in 2025, this fully healthy and fully freed version of Dembélé has been the best player on the planet. His right foot has 10 non-penalty goals and his left foot has eight. Both would be a top-five mark in 2025.
We still don’t know which foot is better — just that each one, by itself, is better than almost everybody else.
This post was originally published on this site