Just under a year ago, the PSG manager Luis Enrique dropped Ousmane Dembele and left him in Paris ahead of their trip to face Arsenal in the Champions League.Dembele and Enrique had fallen out after a disagreement a few days earlier and Enrique decided it would be best to leave the French forward out entirely.
‘If someone doesn’t comply or respect the expectations of the team, it means they are not prepared to play,’ said Enrique, when he arrived in London. ‘I am here to create a team and in the future that might include Ousmane Dembele, just to be clear,’ he insisted.That future included Dembele as the starring act, operating as a false nine.
PSG lost to Arsenal last October but come April, they were playing at the Emirates Stadium again. This time, in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final. Dembélé scored the only goal of that clash and the 28-year-old finished the 2024-25 season with 35 goals and 16 assists across 53 matches as PSG won the treble, including their first ever Champions League title.
On that night in Munich after PSG thrashed Inter Milan 5-0, Enrique sang his praises even though Dembele didn’t score a goal. ‘I’d give the Ballon d’Or to Mr Ousmane Dembele,’ said Enrique.
‘The way he defended, only that can be worth the Ballon d’Or. This is how you lead a team – goals, titles, leadership, defending, how he was pressing… Ousmane is my Ballon d’Or. No doubts at all.’
For a long time, Ousmane was so good that he didn’t need to focus on anything but playing football. He knew he could play PlayStation until 2am and still perform the next day,’ says a source close to him.’It was when things started to get difficult at Barcelona that he realised he wasn’t living the life of a professional player. It just took him a bit of time to mature.
Getting married in 2021 and becoming a dad was a big thing as it made him more responsible and he began to see that discipline off the pitch was crucial to his success,’ the source adds.Karim Benzema, the last Frenchman to win the Ballon d’Or, said he wished he knew about the impact of that discipline off the pitch, earlier than later, and those words have stuck with Dembele, who is the sixth Frenchman to take the accolade after Raymond Kopa (1958), Michel Platini (1983, 1984, 1985), Jean Pierre-Papin (1991), Zinedine Zidane (1998) and Benzema (2022). No other country has produced more Ballon d’Or winners.
