How Ousmane Dembélé Rebuilt His Career to Win the Ballon d’Or

Before you read about the player’s remarkable journey, why not take our quiz, to see how well you recall the 2025/26 season completed by Ousmane Dembélé…

What happens when a lifelong dream turns sour? How does a player respond when high praise he has been lavished with his whole life suddenly becomes criticism?

When Ousmane Dembélé signed for Barcelona in 2017, for a fee totalling £135.5m, including add-ons, greatness was demanded of him.

The world’s media queued up to photograph him, and talk to him. An excited Catalan public wanted to touch and revere him.

When he left, six years later, he was considered shop-worn and injury prone. A player who had promised so much had ultimately delivered little.

Subsequently, his move to PSG in the summer of 2023 received a quarter of the press coverage, attention turning to newer, shinier things.

So how does a player deal with that? From being lauded as a future Ballon d’Or winner to finding himself at the foot of the mountain again?

In Dembélé’s case it was simple. He mined an inner-strength that was founded on the streets of La Madeleine.

The acclaim

La Madeleine, a suburb of Évreux, was a tough neighbourhood. A poor neighbourhood.

From a young age, Dembélé kept out of trouble by playing football, predominantly in a steel cage erected outside of his apartment block. There he perfected an array of tricks, not least an ‘inside hook’ where he would feign to shoot, then cut inside.

The children playing there today call it the ‘Dembouz move’.

Dribbling past opponents ten years his senior, he would tell his friends he was going to be a great player. Football was his way out. An escape from a hard life. Years later, he recalled about his boyhood, saying…

“A kid that grows up in those areas, in a particular environment, doesn’t have the same problem than a kid who grew up in a wealthy household”

Aged 12 he was taken on by Évreux FC 27, a club residing in the seventh tier of French football, and soon after Rennes came calling. His chance. His shot.

It’s fair to say that Dembélé capitalised on his opportunity.

In his first and only season with the Red and Blacks – after scoring prolifically through their youth ranks – he scored 12 Ligue 1 goals and put in a sufficient number of mesmerizing performances to entice Borussia Dortmund.

By May 2016 he had made it to the Bundesliga.

But not for long though, because six goals and 13 assists for the Prussians saw him venerated beyond Germany; saw him elevated to the status of wonderkid.

His sporting director at Rennes was Mikaël Silvestre, a former team-mate of Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United.

Impressed by the teenager, Silvestre made an early claim that Dembélé was destined to become Ronaldo’s peer, a compliment the young player was humbled by, but with a caveat.

For Dembélé, Lionel Messi was the GOAT. His inspiration and chase. And his love for the Argentine forged a long-held dream to play for Barcelona.

The sustained stumble

The striker’s fee on joining the Blaugrana made him the second most expensive player in the world and, in effect, he was replacing the most expensive.

A fortnight earlier, Neymar had left Catalonia for PSG for €222 million.

With big, magical boots to fill the Frenchman’s introduction to his new club was hardly auspicious, nerves getting the better of Dembélé as he attempted to juggle a ball on entering Camp Nou. Such was the welter of hype that accompanied his transfer, his failure to control it became headline news.

Then, almost straight into his tenure in Spain came the injuries. A hamstring issue. A muscle tear. The forward stalled before he could even build up momentum.

In 2019/20 a succession of injuries resulted in him making just four starts in La Liga. Then there was his Champions League miss a season earlier, spurning a golden opportunity to secure Barcelona passage to the final.

All told, Dembélé registered 82 goal involvements in 185 outings for the Spanish giant, a respectable return, while there were flashes of excellence for sure, particularly under Xavi.

Unquestionably though, the searing heat of the hype that accompanied his rise had turned cold.

The renaissance

And so to PSG, home of the French champions, where again he arrived as Neymar left, the transfers concluded within days of one another.

"I want to win trophies! To make the supporters and the city proud”

That was Dembélé on joining the Parisiens, and what was clear from the broad smile on his face was that his hunger was back. His excitement and passion.

Moreover, he was now married with a child, seismic events that had changed him for the better. His team-mates at Barcelona, in his latter period there, had intimated that he had grown-up. Become more responsible.

Demonstrating this, Dembélé had recently hired a nutritionist. He was eating right. Living right. Training right.

Indeed, when acknowledging this, a deep irony emerges. For when Dembélé was a boy he was feted, but too young to properly deal with such acclaim. Now he was a man, and mature enough to handle whatever came his way, expectations had been lowered.

Regardless, the forward wasted little time in altering that.

In his first season in Ligue 1 he conjured up 10 assists, redressing a long-standing misconception that he could be too selfish in his play.

In his second campaign, he quite simply exploded, racking up 51 goal involvements across all competitions, the fourth highest individual number in Europe.

As an integral part of an attacking trident also featuring Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Désiré Doué, PSG romped to another league title before finally securing their first Champions League triumph. Dembélé scored eight goals in that competition, assisting twice in the final.

In December of that year came the moment that confirmed and completed his remarkable renaissance.

At a glittering ceremony held at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the player stepped onto the stage to collect the 69th France Football Ballon d'Or.

From childhood friends in that steel cage, to coaches, to Barcelona’s president Joan Laporta, who once insisted he was ‘better than Mbappe’, it was always believed that Ousmane Dembélé would go on to conquer the world.

It took a sustained and public stumble, but he got there on schedule.

Ousmane Dembele’s PSG stats

2023/24: 42 games, 5 goals, 14 assists

2024/25: 52 games, 35 goals, 16 assists

2025/26: 40 games, 20 goals, 11 assists