Ken Early: Champions League final is Ousmane Dembele's chance to silence his doubters for good

Irish Times

2 days ago

The
2022 World Cup final
is remembered as one of the greatest football matches of all time. For Ousmane Dembélé, it was one of the worst nights of his life.
Only 41 minutes had elapsed when the fourth official came to the sideline and held up the number 11 which meant, for Dembélé, the ultimate humiliation of being substituted in the first half of the biggest game in the world.
He wasn't injured, he had just played terribly. Argentina were shredding France down their right flank. Dembélé gave away a penalty for a foul on Angel di Maria and then was nowhere to be seen as di Maria arrived from deep to finish off a counterattack for Argentina's second.
His performance that night seemed to crystallise the essence of Dembélé: a player of enormous talent but questionable mentality who could be relied on to fail at the decisive moment. At Barcelona, nobody ever forgot how he missed an easy chance to make it 4-0 in the last minute of the home
Champions League
semi-final against
Liverpool
in 2019.
READ MORE
The Camp Nou had never really taken to him. He arrived there in 2017, aged 20, as one of the ill-fated panic buys they made to replace Neymar. He was immediately under pressure to justify his €135 million transfer fee and tasked with making himself relevant to a front three dominated by
Lionel Messi
and Luis Suarez - not the easiest guys to impress.
He was soon being ridiculed as 'Dembulance' due to his frequent injuries. He played six seasons for Barcelona and in every season he suffered a serious hamstring injury.
For most of the history of football, injuries were attributed partly to bad luck and partly to weakness (the euphemism was 'injury proneness') on the part of the individual player. Coaches, fans and even teammates soon grow to despise players who seem to get injured a lot. This might seem irrational, even perverse - why pick on the ones most in need of sympathy and support?
But in another way, hostility towards injured players is a necessary cultural antibody. Players have to be prepared to endure a certain amount of suffering and live with a certain measure of risk. If they sat there worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong they would never play any games. As Jurgen Klopp once told Daniel Sturridge at Liverpool, a player has to know the difference between 'real pain and 'just' pain'.
In March 2020, L'Équipe published a report that traced the root cause of his injuries to Barcelona's training regime
Few embodied that mentality better than Suarez, who dealt with injuries throughout his career by simply refusing to acknowledge them. These days he runs with a pronounced limp, but for Liverpool and Barcelona he hardly ever missed a game.
Inter's Lautaro Martinez showed the same warrior spirit last month by declaring himself fit for the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, defying Inter's doctors and even his own worried mother. He wasn't going to let a hamstring tear keep him out of such a big game. He could hardly move for two days after the game, but in the first half he had scored and won a penalty, so it was worth it.
Inter Milan's Lautaro Martinez (left) scores against Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final second leg at the San Siro. Photograph: Piero Cruciatti/ AFP via Getty Images
This was the quality people were not seeing in Dembélé. He was a player of extraordinary gifts - balance, precision, composure - but was he a fighter? Did he have the mentality of a champion?
At Barcelona, people said he kept getting injured because he was up every night playing video games. After he suffered yet another bad hamstring injury in November 2019, a frustrated Suarez told the media that 'Dembélé and the doctors have to find a solution' - seeming to put the blame equally on both.
Dembélé's camp believed the blame lay elsewhere. In March 2020, L'Équipe published a report that traced the root cause of his injuries to Barcelona's training regime. The problem, according to this report, was that Barcelona were training at the leisurely rhythm of their geriatric officer corps: Messi, Suarez, Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets. So Dembélé would train all week hardly sprinting at all, then be expected to sprint in the matches: no wonder his hamstrings were coming apart like pulled pork. (You can imagine how Barcelona's leadership group reacted to this bulletin).
When PSG bought Dembele for €50 million in the summer of 2023, the reaction of the Catalan press could be summarised as 'good riddance'. Their dismissive judgment was largely borne out by his performances in the first season at PSG - a campaign where the Parisian focus was overwhelmingly on Kylian Mbappé, who ultimately left on a free transfer for Real Madrid.
It's no exaggeration to say Inter's chances of success tonight depend on denying him that space
But for the first time since 2017, Dembélé had completed a full season without tearing a hamstring. Maybe L'Équipe's sources had a point about the importance of sprint training after all. And Mbappé's departure meant the then-27-year old, for the first time in his career, had become the senior player - the leader and reference point for a group of younger stars including Désire Doué and Bradley Barcola.
Recognising that Dembélé was responding well to the increased responsibility, PSG head coach Luis Enrique decided to give him even more. Halfway through this season, Enrique switched Dembélé from the right wing into the centre. The move has revealed a dimension to the player's talent few had suspected even existed.
Ousmane Dembélé has scored 39 goals in his first two seasons with PSG, one less than his goal-scoring tally in six seasons at Barcelona. Photograph: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images
The new false-nine version of Dembélé is the top-scoring forward in Europe in 2025, with 25 goals in 28 club matches. Since coming on at half-time to lay waste to Manchester City in a crucial league-phase match, he has cut a swathe through the Champions League, providing goals and assists in every knockout round and propelling himself into contention for the Ballon d'Or.
If he scores in the Champions League final against Inter Milan, it will be his 40th goal for PSG, equalling the tally he managed in six years at Barcelona.
When a player suddenly explodes like this in a new role, it raises the question: how did nobody think of playing him there before? The fact that Dembélé's classic winger qualities are now so devastating through the centre shows the direction in which football has evolved in the last few seasons.
[
Ken Early: Emi Martínez commits one of the most expensive mistakes in Villa's history
Opens in new window
]
The traditional centre-forward was a player with the physical strength to fight central defenders for the ball. But now so much of the play consists of cat-and-mouse games between the defenders in possession and the attackers on the press. The attackers hunt while the defenders try to play out. Now the dangerous forwards are the ones who can come deep to receive passes out of defence, then have the speed and dribbling ability to do damage in the space. Dembélé's goals at Anfield against Liverpool and the Emirates against Arsenal both came from situations like this.
It's no exaggeration to say Inter's chances of success tonight depend on denying him that space. If any coach and group of players can find a way, it will be Simone Inzaghi and his experienced Inter who believe, after that epic win against Barcelona, destiny is on their side.
But no other team in Europe has reached the level PSG showed in their victories over Manchester City, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal. If they play to their potential they will win. 'Potential' is a word that has followed Dembélé all his life and the older he gets, the more it seems like a curse. Win tonight and he escapes it for good.