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Ballon d’Or 2025 If you were looking for a ruthless goal-getter, you had come to the wrong place. “It’s not just goals that count, ” the headline read, in direct quotation marks, above a photograph of a beaming Ousmane Dembele. In the accompanying interview, published by L’Equipe in November 2023, the Paris Saint-Germain forward declared that although he was conscious of his potential to score more goals, his reasonably meagre record in that regard was not something that unduly concerned him. “I sleep very well at night, ” he said. “I still have confidence in myself. ” Advertisement Two years earlier, in an interview with the same publication, he had been even more unequivocal. Asked how he would like to be remembered as a player, he replied: “I’d like people to say: he was a dribbler who was great to watch. That at one o’clock, four o’clock or nine o’clock, you turned on your television and took the time to watch me dribble and score goals. ” The order of priority was clear: dribbling first, scoring goals second. Before last season, Dembele’s circumspect attitude towards the art of putting the ball in the net was reflected by his career statistics. He had not reached double figures for league goals since netting 12 in his breakthrough campaign at Rennes in 2015-16, and across all competitions, he had never mustered more than the 14 he chalked up in his second season at Barcelona in 2018-19. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed. Shifted into a new false nine role by PSG head coach Luis Enrique midway through last season, Dembele responded with an astonishing burst of goal-scoring form, netting 27 times in 22 games over the course of the winter and the early spring. By the time the dust had settled on the campaign, he had taken his tally in all competitions to 35 — only five fewer than the total amassed over the course of his six-year spell at Barcelona — and inspired PSG to a historic quadruple and a runners-up finish in the Club World Cup. On Monday night in Paris, the momentum that had propelled both him and PSG to glory last season carried the 28-year-old to the sport’s ultimate individual honour when he was awarded the 2025 Ballon d’Or. He became the sixth Frenchman to have won the award, after Raymond Kopa, Michel Platini, Jean-Pierre Papin, Zinedine Zidane and Karim Benzema, and the first since Marseille’s Papin in 1991 to have won it while wearing the colours of a French side. Advertisement So how did Dembele go from goal-shy dribble merchant to lifetime member of football’s most exclusive club? Luis Enrique knew he wanted to deploy one of his players as a false nine. He just did not know which one. The main dilemma facing the Asturian coach as he embarked upon his second season in the PSG dugout was how to plug the goal deficit created by Kylian Mbappe’s departure to Real Madrid. His instinct was to approach the issue in a collective way. “If someone scores 40 goals, we certainly won’t close the door on him, but if I look at my own experience, you’re better off with four players who score 12 goals each, ” Luis Enrique said on the eve of the campaign. “That makes 48 in total and that’s better than 40. ” Goncalo Ramos went into the season as PSG’s first-choice No 9, but the Portuguese striker was forced off by an ankle injury after only 20 minutes of a 4-1 win at Le Havre on the opening weekend. Reluctant to place his faith in Randal Kolo Muani, Luis Enrique began auditioning his attacking midfielders in the false nine role. Marco Asensio, Lee Kang-in and new signing Desire Doue were all given opportunities over the season’s early weeks, but none of them succeeded in getting to grips with the position. Although PSG were flying in Ligue 1, goals were proving problematically elusive in the Champions League. After labouring to a 1-0 win over Girona in their opening fixture, they drew at home to PSV and lost at home to Atletico Madrid despite completely dominating both games. A 1-0 defeat at Bayern Munich in late November left them staring at the humiliating prospect of a league-phase elimination. Luis Enrique had been an admirer of Dembele’s since his time as head coach at Barcelona, having first enquired about the winger’s availability following his breakout season as a teenager at Rennes. “Luis Enrique was very excited about the prospect of what Dembele could become under him from the very beginning at PSG, ” says one source, speaking anonymously to protect relationships. Advertisement Following Mbappe’s exit, Dembele had been assured by the PSG hierarchy that he would be “the leader of the attack”, according to a source close to the player. He was subsequently disappointed to discover that central midfielder Vitinha, and not he, had been chosen by Luis Enrique to succeed Mbappe as first-choice penalty-taker. The season’s first four months yielded no indication of the transformation that was just around the corner. Dembele started regularly in a familiar right-wing role, but was dropped for his side’s 2-0 loss at Arsenal in early October after reporting late for a training session. Deployed alongside Bradley Barcola as a split striker in the defeat against Bayern the following month, he blotted his copybook again by being sent off for two bookable offences shortly before the hour. Luis Enrique described it as a “serious mistake”. Dembele started PSG’s next two league matches against Auxerre and Nantes on the bench. But for the home game with Lyon on December 15, he came back into the starting XI — and the team’s playing identity suddenly snapped into focus. Dembele had played in a central striking role for PSG before, most notably in games against Marseille and Real Sociedad towards the end of the previous campaign, although in both instances, he operated as a withdrawn foil for nominal left-sided forward Mbappe. Here, against Lyon, he was the main man, flanked by Lee on his right and by Doue on his left. He put PSG ahead in the eighth minute at the Parc des Princes, dispatching Doue’s cutback with a low, left-foot strike into the bottom-right corner, and created a succession of chances for his team-mates in a breezy 3-1 win. La machine était lancée, as they say in French. The machine was up and running. He scored twice in a 4-2 win at Monaco before the Ligue 1 winter break, gave PSG victory over the same opponents with a stoppage-time goal in the Trophee des Champions in Doha in their first outing of 2025, and then claimed another double as Luis Enrique’s men returned to league action with a win over Saint-Etienne. Advertisement Having started on the bench due to illness, Dembele sparked PSG’s storming comeback against Manchester City in the Champions League with the first of the four second-half goals that gave the home side a watershed 4-2 win. After another goal in a 1-1 draw against Reims, he became the first player in PSG’s history to score hat-tricks in consecutive games by plundering triples against Stuttgart and Brest. Successive braces followed against Monaco and Brest (this time, against the latter, in the Champions League play-off round). By now, he had amassed 18 goals in 10 games and was scoring at a rate unmatched in world football. Whereas before, he had been renowned for scoring after mazy dribbles or slamming shots home from distance, these were striker’s goals: tap-ins, clever dinks, scruffy rebounds and instinctive first-time efforts. He said he had learned to place his shots rather than always going for power. “He does lots of video work, ” says a member of Dembele’s entourage, speaking under the condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “And he’s done a lot of work on his shooting in order to become more clinical in front of goal. ” “I’d been playing more as a right-sided midfielder glued to the touchline up to now. It was harder to score goals – I had to beat three or four players before scoring, ” Dembele explained after his hat-trick against Brest. “Now, as a No 9, you only have one player (to beat) or it’s just about tapping the ball into the net. ” A remarkably two-footed player, Dembele had always enjoyed playing in central positions, having operated as a No 10 at both Rennes and Borussia Dortmund and as part of a two-man strike-force under Ronald Koeman at Barcelona. Deployed now as the cutting edge of a dizzyingly well-oiled football machine, he was fully fulfilling his enormous potential at long last. “What’s good about this role is that he’s at the heart of the action and he can participate in the build-up play, but he can also finish things off, ” says Dembele’s close friend Moustapha Diatta. “It’s a role that he accepted, initially out of a sense of duty, in order to respect what the coach expected of him, but then out of pleasure because scoring goals, combining with his team-mates and being at the heart of the action has given him a lot of pleasure. “When people talked about Ousmane, it was always about what he might become if he started scoring goals. This year, everyone has the answer. ” Inevitably, Dembele’s rapid rate of goalscoring could not last forever, but what his goals lost in frequency, they more than made up for in importance. Against Liverpool in the Champions League last 16 and Arsenal in the semi-finals, he scored strikingly similar goals that showcased both his tactical intelligence and his newfound poacher’s instincts. He dropped deep to help his team escape the opposition press, spread a pass out wide to a team-mate, and then moved into the box to apply the finishing touch. Advertisement When he did not score, he remained decisive, contributing assists in both legs of the Champions League quarter-final win over Aston Villa, teeing up Achraf Hakimi for the goal that put paid to Arsenal in the semi-final second leg, and laying on goals for Doue and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia in PSG’s 5-0 annihilation of Inter in the final (in addition to supplying the brilliant backheel that paved the way for Doue to score the killer third goal). But the image of Dembele that went viral after the final did not depict him doing anything with the ball. Instead, it was the sight of him lurking with intent on the edge of the penalty area at Inter goal kicks, eyes wide open and riveted on opposition goalkeeper Yann Sommer, ready to set PSG’s ultra-aggressive press into action the moment the ball was kicked. Previously derided as a soloist, liable to get lost in his own dribbles, here was a player wholly — even a little terrifyingly — committed to the team cause. “For me, a forward isn’t allowed to cheat, ” Dembele told France Football at the end of the season. “He has to put the effort in all the time, whether that’s in a defensive sense or an attacking sense, to help the team and not just when we’re attacking. “The coach came to speak to me at the beginning of the season. He told me that I had to set an example for the younger players, that I was the first defender in the team. The message got through. ” Although Dembele has occasionally driven his coaches to distraction over the course of his career, his naturally cheery, carefree demeanour has invariably made him highly popular with his team-mates. Doue, Dembele’s team-mate with both PSG and France, has described him as a “big brother”. Vitinha, citing his role in PSG’s minutely calibrated pressing game, says he is “a leader by example”. “Aside from football, he is a very good person, ” PSG midfielder Joao Neves told The Athletic earlier this year. “He’s fun, he’s friendly and he’s always in a good mood — well, in the morning, sometimes not! But he’s almost always in a good mood. And as a football player, he’s a world-class superstar. I’m really happy to be his team-mate. ” Victory over Chelsea in the Club World Cup final would likely have removed all suspense regarding Dembele’s Ballon d’Or candidacy, but although he and his team-mates finished on the wrong end of a surprisingly one-sided 3-0 defeat at Met Life Stadium, PSG’s No 10 had already made a mark on the competition, recovering from an injury that kept him out of the group phase to score against both Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in the knockout rounds. Advertisement It undoubtedly helped that Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal, his main rival for the prize, did not even feature at the tournament. But as the stand-out player for the European season’s stand-out team, and in the absence of any major international tournaments, which might have allowed any number of players to steal his limelight, Dembele was an entirely logical choice. If the Ballon d’Or serves above all as recognition for what the player who wins it has achieved over the preceding 12 months, it is also, inevitably, a reflection of what every other eligible player has not achieved. Yamal undoubtedly dazzled for Barcelona, notching up 18 goals and 25 assists in all competitions and causing jaws to hit the floor on a weekly if not twice-weekly basis, but despite tasting glory in La Liga, the 18-year-old Spain international — and likewise his Barca team-mate Raphinha — was penalised by the club’s inability to go all the way in the Champions League. Ditto Mohamed Salah, despite his extraordinary season with Premier League champions Liverpool. With Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi’s careers now easing down (not that the former would ever admit it), two men who once seemed destined to succeed them as the game’s pre-eminent footballers experienced seasons of contrasting fortunes. Mbappe enjoyed a successful maiden campaign at Real Madrid on a personal level, scoring 44 goals in all competitions, but only won the UEFA Super Cup and Intercontinental Cup, while Erling Haaland finished empty-handed for the first time in his Manchester City career. A place on the podium in last year’s Ballon d’Or, meanwhile, proved to be something of a poisoned chalice. Winner Rodri spent almost the entire season on the sidelines, runner-up Vinicius Junior has been in a funk ever since missing out on the award, and third-place Jude Bellingham was unable to recapture the heights of his first season at Real Madrid. As for Dembele’s PSG team-mates, although Hakimi, Vitinha and Nuno Mendes — to name but three — were all outstanding candidates in their own right, they were always likely to be eclipsed by the club’s principal attacking star. At Rennes, Dembele was the scatter-brained boy wonder who did not even know which was his stronger foot. At Dortmund, he was a shining star whose light suddenly dimmed when he went on strike to force through a move away. At Barcelona, he was by turns the undisciplined youngster, the perennial injury victim and the big-money flop, before growing up, learning how to take care of his body and becoming a dependable performer. At PSG, he became the best footballer in the world. Additional reporting: Mark Carey (Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Tom Williams is a freelance writer for The Athletic, covering French football