PSG’s Ousmane Dembélé takes centre stage as football’s chief late bloomer
Timekeeping used to be an issue for the Frenchman but now his rapid pressing is pushing him towards a Ballon d’Or
Ousmane Dembélé is right behind you and way ahead of everyone, which is just where Luis Enrique always imagined him. At the end of Paris Saint-Germain’s destruction of Real Madrid in the semi-final of the Club World Cup in New Jersey this week, the coach declared his No 10 the season’s best player “by far”; not so much for the 35 goals and 16 assists but for something more simple. So simple it has taken a decade to do. But then Didier Deschamps, his national team manager with France, did say that being late is “a little habit of his”.
Well, it was. If there is a portrait that defines the PSG team potentially 90 minutes from winning it all, an image that embodies them and Dembélé’s transformation, it may be that shot of him poised, coiled, at the edge of Inter’s area in the Champions League final. Toes on the line, his eyes narrow and fixed on Yann Sommer like a leopard ready to pounce, a sprinter listening for the gun. It is a scene repeated relentlessly, opponents made prey, Wednesday at the MetLife another episode. “I told him he was pressing a lot; he told me he has to,” Madrid’s keeper, Thibaut Courtois, said. “I get half a second to think.”
That was half a second more than most. The semi-final had been virtually decided inside nine minutes, PSG scoring twice. Both times, Madrid made mistakes, Raúl Asencio and Antonio Rüdiger allowing the ball to escape them: not much, but enough. Both times, Dembélé was alert, on to them in a flash, sneaking up and then: bam. Like antelope narrated by David Attenborough, before they realised what had happened, Madrid’s defenders were done. “Scary,” Jürgen Klinsmann called it.
“They didn’t let Inter breathe, not even for one moment,” said the Germany World Cup winner, who is analysing the tournament with Fifa’s technical study group. “They suffocate you from the first second; they get on to the pitch and get at you. Against Madrid, yes, the two goals were mistakes but they were forced; it’s a high press with such energy, so aggressive it’s scary.” And it starts with Dembélé. “I would give the Ballon d’Or to Mr Ousmane Dembélé, for how he pressed,” Luis Enrique said after the Champions league final. “That is leading a team.”
“I haven’t always been like that,” Dembélé admits.
He was always different: explosive, entirely two-footed, unpredictable. There is a reason Thomas Tuchel, his coach at Borussia Dortmund, had wanted him at Chelsea, Sunday’s final opponents. A reason too – as well as desperation after Neymar’s departure for PSG, admittedly – that Barcelona spent €145m on him. A reason Xavi Hernández had insisted that he could become the best player in the world in his position, making Dembélé’s contract extension hisa first priority when he arrived at the Camp Nou as coach.
But that was 2021 and a rescue mission: Dembélé had been in Barcelona four years and, what moments there had been were too brief, injuries invariably intervening, the feeling that he wasn’t really looking after himself as unavoidable as it was perhaps unfair. When Dembélé departed two years later, the anger was about the way he went not the fact that he went: there was talent, everyone knew that, but the truth was that he had been largely irrelevant and they didn’t lament his leaving. When he went all philosophical during the battles over his contract, denouncing “blackmail”, people wondered where this personality had suddenly come from. When the president, Joan Laporta, had said he was better than Kylian Mbappé, it was, well, just like Laporta. Mostly, people laughed.
Turns out, he may be right. In the semi-final certainly, in this season too. “If he doesn’t win the Ballon d’Or, that’s the Ballon d’Or’s problem,” PSG’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, said, which he probably would, butDembélé has been a revelation. Moved into a central position, he has scored more this season than in the previous five put together. He has scored against Real Madrid, Liverpool, Bayern, Arsenal, and Manchester City. His role was decisive in the Champions League final and the Club World Cup semi-final. He was Ligue 1’s top scorer. You shouldn’t buy Ballon d’Or winners, you should make them, Luis Enrique said, and perhaps he has.
Should PSG beat Chelsea, they will join an esteemed list of elite European clubs – Celtic, Bayern Munich, Barcelona (twice), Ajax and PSV – to have won every men’s competition they have participated in during a season. Celtic in 1966-67 won five trophies, clinching the domestic treble, the Glasgow Cup and the European Cup. PSG can match that tally. Linfield of Northern Ireland won all seven domestic tournaments they participated in 1921-22 and in 1961-62. Barcelona (2009) and Bayern won (2020) won “sextuples” across different seasons. Ervin Ang
Dembélé has benefited from the system and benefited the system. As much as a system, it is an ecosystem, a collective culture, at once simple and complex. Style, age, environment, opportunity all count, built in part by circumstance, timing. “Last year I went empty handed because Kylian took it all again,” Dembélé joked when he collected his player of the year award in France, true words said in jest. “He did it all himself,” Luis Enrique said, but at the heart of it all is a coach who brought “extreme principles”, in the words of Vincent Kompany.
“The coach has changed lots of things,” Dembélé said.
Luis Enrique believed in Dembélé from the beginning, despite the warnings. At Barcelona, Gerard Piqué joked that the team’s WhatsApp group was a handy reminder for a kid “is always late”, and Deschamps said Dembélé should be “careful” about his timekeeping. But even in private conversations where others feared that the Frenchman could not apply the intensity demanded by a manager who can be extreme, when frankly they wondered if he was too lazy, unlikely to offer the commitment required, the coach was convinced. There could be criticism for others, but there was always a defence of Dembélé. Yes, it could be – is – like he is on his own planet sometimes, but there was a player in there.
“Dembélé has always been a phenomenon,” Luis Enrique said. “The thing is, you have to go deeper to get the best version of Ousmane.”
His version. Aggressive, relentless, chasing everything. “It’s not just the goals or the decisive passes, it’s his overall impact that makes the team win trophies,” Luis Enrique said. “He has shown he is a step above. He is our best player, someone who can make the difference, because he has convictions.” It is that part of his game – the collective contribution rather than the individual, the press rather than the goals – that the coach returns to repeatedly.
Yet they are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are mutually dependent. Dembélé is looked after, embraced, trusted and made to feel important as well as being made aware of his obligations, the demands. For a coach who is extremely strict, who likes working with young players because they are faster, hungrier and almost always more malleable, it is also about letting go, complicity, a connection. About warmth and support, belief. With Dembélé, who at 28 is among the oldest at PSG now, the relationship is especially close.
Until the joking stops. “The best thing I did was leave him out against Arsenal,” Luis Enrique said after he had felt the need to punish his player for indiscipline. “I had to take a hard decision but I thought it was the best for the team and I would do it again a hundred times. We have had to do and say difficult things.
“Ousmane is a leader, but in what he does, not with words. Have you seen how he pressed? Tell me a No 9 in Europe who presses the goalkeeper and the centre-backs like that. When you press like that, the rest have to follow.”
When you press like that, you are also closer to goal and to chances: the intensity is higher, the trigger points more sensitive, but the overall distances are reduced and when you can rob the ball in those positions everything opens. PSG play with two full-backs joining the rotation and movement through midfield, players carrying the ball all over the pitch, and forwards who are all dribblers – “dribblers are scarce but we have five of them,” Luis Enrique said. That creates an environment that works for the players, Dembélé especially.
“You have a false 9, a wide player, two-footed, who can go both sides, who has the freedom and mobility to find pockets of space,” Portugal’s coach, Roberto Martínez, said. “[But] when you analyse Dembélé, you have to start not at the end, with him, but the beginning. PSG work so hard to get players ahead of the ball, to give passing lines. People talk about them working off the ball but it’s also with it: players offer to receive, don’t get it, keep moving, offer again, don’t get it, keep moving. They are relentless. They have a high volume of quality chances and they work incredibly hard for that. It’s a whole lot of work, a whole lot of belief, an extreme belief and players who love to play that way.”
They love it because it pays off, so it becomes self-perpetuating, reinforced with every win. And then there’s something simple: fun, enjoyment, engagement. “It’s very easy to find the words to say it, but actually doing it is harder, [yet] that’s the key to everything we do,” Luis Enrique said. Klinsmann said: “As a striker it is a system you love. It is fascinating, because it’s also about chemistry: you can only play this kind of football if everybody, everybody, buys into it. If there is even one who doesn’t, the moment you have one not committing, not getting into people’s faces, you are going to fail.”
Why do players buy into an idea, why is Dembélé doing things he hadn’t before? Because of everything, and because he likes it. The man who was always the last to arrive is now always the first, so sharp, so quick, so alive that other footballers don’t see him coming until he’s gone.