Ousmane Dembele, the ‘paranormal' PSG talent who knows all about the Bolsheviks

New York Times

a day ago

Control with the inside of the left foot, thump.
Control with the inside of the right foot, thump.
Control with the left thigh, this time, the ball arriving a bit higher. Touch to the right, thump.
The ball smacking against the wall and springing back towards him through the puddles, the spray flying off it. The rain hammering down, his sodden tracksuit clinging to his skin. The noise of the ball hitting the wall echoing around the square. Over and over: right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. Control, thump. Control, touch, thump.
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Ousmane Dembele is still a child, but he is already obsessed with football. If his friends are around, he plays with them: furiously contested kickabouts on the bare concrete of his neighbourhood, a pair of trees or a couple of backpacks for goals.
If they are not, or if they are deterred by the weather, he comes here, to a playground a stone's throw from the high-rise apartment block he calls home, and wallops his football against the side of a squat red-brick building with a sloping terracotta-coloured roof.
It is an easy, carefree pastime, but even at this young age, he knows that it will make him a better footballer; every touch and every shot strengthening his bond with the ball, sharpening his muscle memory. Control, thump. Control, touch, thump.
The spindly youngster is at the beginning of a journey that will successively turn him into one of the most promising, one of the most unfortunate, one of the most maddening and ultimately one of the most celebrated football players in the world.
At Rennes and then Borussia Dortmund, he is the very epitome of footballing potential: a whirlwind of sidesteps and breezy dribbles, a broad smile forever stretched across his face, a trail of befuddled opponents forever floundering in his wake.
At Barcelona, after a record-breaking €135million transfer, things get complicated: injuries, recurrent complaints about his time-keeping and professionalism, the fear that his potential is destined never to be truly fulfilled.
But the planets have aligned at Paris Saint-Germain, where his abrupt transformation into a prolific goalscorer means that he approaches Saturday's Champions League final against Inter in Munich accompanied by a higher level of expectation than perhaps any other player. Should PSG prevail, the Ballon d'Or could well be his.
As he stands on the brink of career-defining glory, this is his story so far.
By Moustapha Diatta's reckoning, he was five years old when he first met Dembele, who was one year older. The two boys' mothers were close friends and their families lived in the same building in La Madeleine, a disadvantaged district of the Normandy town of Evreux, which lies 60 miles west of Paris.
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'The days often revolved around football,' Diatta tells The Athletic. 'We'd have kickabouts with friends at the foot of our building or we'd challenge a team from another neighbourhood to a game.
'Ousmane always had a ball with him. And he had a gift. He could already shoot with both feet and his dribbling was instinctive. The results were pretty incredible.'
A child of the 2000s, having been born in May 1997, Dembele grew up idolising players such as David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Lionel Messi. The dream of following in their gilded footsteps took root at an early age.
'When we were young, he told me several times that he was going to become a great player,' says Diatta. 'That's one of his character traits: when he wants something, he does everything to get it.'
Dembele was seven years old when he and Diatta joined local club ALM Evreux (later to become Evreux FC), whose pitches lay a 10-minute walk away across the Boulevard du 14 Juillet. The first time Evreux youth coach Gregory Badoche laid eyes on him, he could scarcely believe them.
'He stood out a mile,' Badoche recalls. 'It was almost paranormal: the quality of his sidesteps, his dribbles, the crazy changes of rhythm. He was a little shrimp, you know, a very slender guy with legs like toothpicks, but his dribbling ability was insane.'
Interest from major local clubs did not take long to arrive. Le Havre and Caen both made overtures, but Rennes won out after offering to help Dembele's family — his mother, Fatimata, his brother and his two sisters – to relocate to Brittany with him.
Expectations, on both sides, were high.
'There was a recruiter from Rennes called Armand Djire who used to come and watch him regularly,' says Badoche. 'When Ousmane was still only 12, Armand said to me: 'If he doesn't become a professional, I'll end my career'.'
As the former director of the Rennes academy, Yannick Menu has equally fond memories of 'Dembouz' the burgeoning footballer and Dembele the burgeoning person.
'Ousmane is someone who's very cheerful and very smiley,' he says.
'Sometimes our relationship was a bit stormy, because when you're in contact with a young person every day, that can happen. But he loved football and he loved training and he always gave everything on the pitch.'
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Dembele made rapid progress in the Rennes youth ranks and was capped by France at both under-17 and under-18 level. But he was frustrated by what he felt was a lack of consideration from the club. Amid interest from Red Bull Salzburg, he downed tools in the summer of 2015, sitting out a two-week training camp in Germany, before eventually putting pen to paper on a three-year professional contract.
After making his debut off the bench in a 2-0 win at Angers in October 2015, the 18-year-old became a fixture in the starting XI and finished his maiden campaign with an excellent return of 12 goals and five assists from 26 Ligue 1 games.
'He was very collective-minded,' says former Rennes head coach Philippe Montanier. 'He was a dribbler, but he always dribbled with intention.
'And he had personality as well. I remember the derby against Lorient (a 2-2 draw in January 2016). We went 2-0 down in the first half, but he was the one who was urging his team-mates to react.'
Dembele's remarkable two-footedness left observers agog. A hat-trick of right-foot strikes in a 4-1 win over Nantes was followed by a notorious post-match interview in which even he seemed not to know which was his stronger foot.
The unintentionally comical effect of that interview created an impression of a young player whose head was tethered to his shoulders with less than customary tightness. But those who know him insist that behind the impression of absent-mindedness lies a keen intelligence.
'Sometimes he'll seem a bit in his own world, then the next second he'll seem very switched on,' says a source close to Dembele, speaking anonymously to protect relationships.
'He's passionate about historical documentaries, for example. So in a conversation, you might think he's a bit lost, but then he'll suddenly start talking to you about the Bolsheviks.
'It's like when he's on the pitch — he's constantly throwing people off-balance.'
Before his first season in senior football had reached its conclusion, Dembele had been announced as a Dortmund player, joining the club from the Ruhr valley on a five-year contract for a fee of €15million.
Diatta, who played at centre-back, signed for Dortmund's reserves and the pair embarked on a German adventure together, first living in a hotel and then moving into a house in the city centre.
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'We had a pretty simple life there,' Diatta recalls. 'It was our first experience overseas, so we were discovering life abroad. We were lucky to find French players there like Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who really took Ousmane under his wing.'
The kind of football career that Dembele had pictured for himself in those kickabouts in La Madeleine was suddenly upon him: a gigantic stadium, packed to the rafters with 80,000 wildly cheering fans; glamorous Champions League ties against Real Madrid, Sporting CP, Benfica and Monaco; taut domestic tussles with Bayern Munich and RB Leipzig.
Initially taken aback by the intensity of Dortmund's training sessions, Dembele soon got up to speed and credited head coach Thomas Tuchel with giving him the liberty to play his natural game.
'When I have the ball, it's total freedom,' he told L'Equipe. 'It's something that I need. I'm allowed to move into the middle, put myself in the number 10 position, change wings. It's gratifying to feel this confidence in me, as if I was 25.'
Forming a devilish three-pronged attack alongside Aubameyang and Marco Reus, Dembele enjoyed a brilliant first season, playing a starring role in Dortmund's conquest of the DFB-Pokal and being named the Bundesliga's Rookie of the Season (one year on from having won the equivalent award in France).
But the youngster's impatience came to the fore once more the following summer when he went on strike again, leaving a bad taste at Dortmund that lingers to this day. This time it was to force through a move to the club of his dreams.
Before joining Barcelona, Dembele had never sustained a serious injury. Within two weeks of being unveiled at a sun-soaked Camp Nou in August 2017, he ruptured the tendon in the femoral bicep of his left thigh, which sidelined him for nearly four months. It created an unfortunate template for what was to follow.
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In Dembele's early years at Barca, his body continually betrayed him. Further problems with his left hamstring came in January 2018 and March 2019. A muscle tear in his right thigh in May 2019. A muscle tear in his left thigh the following August. A complete right hamstring tear in February 2020. A knee tendon issue in June 2021 that forced him out of Euro 2020.
By the time he left Barcelona in the summer of 2023, after six seasons at the club, he had missed no fewer than 119 matches due to injury.
It did not help that, even when he was fit, he did not always seem entirely present, with repeated instances of lateness driving the club's decision-makers to distraction.
Dembele was living with Diatta and his uncle in a luxurious house in Barcelona's upmarket Pedralbes neighbourhood and the fear within the club was that he was spending too much time playing video games and not enough time focused on football.
'In his early days, he didn't have the professional mindset of a Barca player,' says a source who worked with Dembele during his time at the club.
'His eating habits were horrible. He also had a phase when he'd show up very late for training. He was fined for that multiple times. Sometimes he'd fall asleep at home and that was it. He even missed medical appointments.'
Diatta puts Dembele's teething problems at Barca down to inexperience. 'When you buy a player at such a young age and there are lots of expectations around him, you should be able to forgive him a few little mistakes,' he says.
Eventually, the penny dropped. Encouraged by his agent, Moussa Sissoko, Dembele took on a full-time personal chef, Anthony Audebaud, in the summer of 2019. Out went the Coca-Cola and the ready meals, in came the sea bream, the sea bass, the spring chicken and the vegetables.
A year later he started working with a personal fitness coach, former elite sprinter Salah Ghaidi, and physiotherapist Jean-Baptiste Duault, who was taken on after impressing Dembele's entourage with his analysis of the player's injury problems in an interview with L'Equipe.
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The feeling in Dembele's camp was that Barcelona's focus on patient, possession-dependent football meant that their training sessions were not sufficiently dynamic for him from a physical perspective. Backed by his new personal support staff, Dembele took physical preparation and injury prevention into his own hands, constructing a daily fitness schedule designed to strengthen and protect the muscles that had previously been his undoing.
With his injury problems finally behind him, Dembele's last three seasons at Barcelona were much happier as he became a key figure under first Ronald Koeman and then Xavi. Although his attacking statistics remained largely underwhelming, he bowed out as a Barca player with three La Liga titles and two Copa del Rey wins to his name.
'He eventually became a sort of veteran in the dressing room and his team-mates understood him better in his last years,' says the Barcelona source. 'Dembele ended up being loved for how he was.'
The turnaround in Dembele's Barca fortunes also permitted him to resurrect his international career. He played only a peripheral role in France's triumph at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, having lost his place after their opening game, and then went 860 days without playing for Les Bleus between November 2018 and March 2021.
But although injury curtailed his involvement at Euro 2020, he was a first-choice pick on the right flank at both the 2022 World Cup and Euro 2024. Close to Kylian Mbappe, Dembele is popular in the France squad due to his irrepressible bonhomie and has long retained national coach Didier Deschamps' backing, in spite of his many injury problems, thanks to his unique ability to unlock matches.
'Some players understand things very quickly and are already mature at the age of 19 or 20, like Kylian,' says Ludovic Batelli, who coached both Dembele and Mbappe at under-19 level with France.
'I think Ousmane needed a bit more time to understand that work, rigour and discipline would make him even more effective and successful. But as they say — better late than never.'
Having agreed to meet a €50million (£42.9m, $54.9m) release clause in Dembele's Barcelona contract, the PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi sold his club's project to the forward by vowing that he would be the homegrown figurehead of a young, hungry team with a strong French identity.
Paris had been a 70-minute train ride from Evreux during Dembele's childhood and he had happy memories of going to watch games with his friends at the Parc des Princes.
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It helped, too, that Dembele already knew PSG's newly appointed coach. While coach of Barcelona, Luis Enrique had enquired about the winger's availability following his breakthrough at Rennes, only for Dembele to inform him that he had already given his word to Dortmund. Seven years on, their paths finally converged.
'Luis Enrique was fiercely protective of him, right from day one,' says a source close to the PSG coach. 'He was confident that he had something magical in his hands and that under him, Dembele was going to flourish.'
After claiming a league and Coupe de France double alongside Mbappe in his maiden PSG season, Dembele was one of the players expected to step up to the plate when his long-time friend left the French capital for Real Madrid last summer.
Things did not get off to the best start when he was dropped on disciplinary grounds for PSG's 2-0 defeat at Arsenal in the Champions League in October.
Dembele had questioned Luis Enrique's possession-heavy tactics during a team briefing and subsequently reported late for a training session, although a source close to him suggests that he was primarily axed for the trip to the Emirates Stadium in order to send a message to the rest of the squad.
Yet only two months later, Luis Enrique happened upon a tactical innovation that would reinvigorate PSG's season — and transform Dembele's career.
The decision to deploy Dembele as a false nine for a 3-1 home win over Lyon in mid-December proved the spark for a stupendous run of goal-scoring form in which the France international racked up 27 goals in only 22 appearances.
Amassed in the space of only three and a half months, it represented twice as many goals as he had ever previously mustered over the course of an entire season.
Dembele, who has scored 33 goals in all competitions, attributes his improved fortunes to the fact that his central role means he has to expend less effort in order to get into shooting positions, enabling him to take aim at goal with fresher legs. Sources close to him additionally point to the hours of work he has spent on his finishing in training over the last 12 months, as well as input from a personal video analyst.
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As the deliberately elusive focal point of a deliberately loose-limbed starting XI, the super-fit Dembele also plays a pivotal role in PSG's build-up play and their formidable pressing game.
Having turned 28 earlier this month, Dembele is one of the senior figures in the PSG squad. Although grand speeches have never been his style ('a connector rather than a leader' is how one source describes him), he fulfils an important function in the club's youthful, multilingual changing room.
'He speaks several languages, which facilitates links with his team-mates,' says a source close to the PSG squad. 'He's also someone who's very jovial, who likes taking the mick, and that helps to create a good atmosphere and bind the squad together.'
Dembele's performances have also benefited from the fact that, away from the pitch, he has moved into a more settled phase in his life. He married Moroccan influencer Rima Edbouche in December 2021 and they had a baby daughter in September 2022.
A practicing Muslim, PSG's No 10 is scrupulously discrete about his private life and describes himself as 'casanier', meaning 'a homebody'. Though fatherhood and the demands of elite-level football have inevitably reduced the amount of free time on his hands, he remains a committed Football Manager player and watches as much live football as he can. 'I watch practically every championship,' he confided to Le Parisien last year.
Few would have bet on him emerging from the current campaign with a stronger claim to the Ballon d'Or than Mbappe. But according to those who know him, until he has the Champions League trophy in his hands, thoughts of individual glory can wait.
'For him, the most important thing is to win the Champions League with Paris Saint-Germain, because it would be something historic,' says best friend Diatta.
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'And it'd be deserved, when you look at his journey. He's been through tough times, people have spoken ill of him, about the injuries and things like that, but he's never complained. He's just kept working.'
One more assured first touch, one more thumping finish, and a little boy's dreams will all come true.
Additional reporting: Pol Ballus
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Franc Fife / Getty, Aurelien Meunier/ Getty Images, Franco Arland/ Getty)