Dembélé’s hot streak transforms him from ‘wasted talent’ to ‘phenomenon’

The quality is there in the way he moves, all easy grace, clean lines

15 Feb 2025 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

A few years ago a British newspaper published a thousand-word article about Ousmane Dembélé not going to a notorious Spanish sex club.

The article featured 14 photos of the notorious sex club Dembélé had never been to, including one of a frightening sex-crucifix Dembélé had never been lashed to, and another of a Spiderman-style sex-net Dembélé would never find himself contorted around in the grip of tearful public ecstasy. There was even a greasy close-up of the sex-doorbell Dembélé would never furtively press, go anywhere near, or be aware of existing.

Instead, as the author notes sadly, Dembélé “lives a reclusive lifestyle playing on his Playstation and watching Narcos with his friends”. These activities are at least cast in vaguely debauched terms. They happen, we are told, “while swallowing fast food and fizzy drinks”. Swallowing. They don’t even chew, mate. And things brighten up towards the end at the notion Dembélé might have been late for training because he was disturbed by “dozens of couples engaging in orgies” at the sex club down the road that he never went to.

In Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida describes the instability of meaning, arguing that all texts are only ever a projection of some half-glimpsed intention. I don’t really understand what all that means. But I think it means the author of this article really, really wanted to go to a sex club.

Dembélé was 20 at the time. Seven years on, he remains something of a blank canvas, a screen on to which it seems necessary to project some kind of meaning.

This quality is there in the way he moves on the pitch, all easy grace and clean lines. It’s even present in his social media feed, the kind of a space that is generally an overload of brain-mangling information, Neymar dressed in a solid-gold bowler hat and shoes made entirely from parmesan cheese. By comparison Dembélé’s occasional Instagram posts are notably stark, just him in generic clothes and the same haircut, being Ousmane Dembélé.

Perhaps this explains in part why he has always been a repository for broad-brush and ill-fitting ideas. Most notably during the spell at Barcelona, when he was portrayed as that familiar figure, the lazy footballer, feral youth, an emblem of All That Is Wrong. Perhaps it also explains why his current hot streak has been seized on so hungrily.

Google "Dembélé" now and you will find that he is currently the best player in the world. Not just very good or in great form, but the best. “We are witnessing a phenomenon,” Le Parisien reported this week after two goals and a decent performance against Brest. Dembélé is “in the race for the Ballon d’or”, not to mention “as important as a Kylian Mbappé, more impactful than an Erling Haaland without doubt”.

Woah there. Let’s just dial it back a bit. Step down from the sex-gallows. Stash that copy of Derrida’s Ousmane Dembélé And the Obligation to Mean Something. It has been eight years of this now, of hyperbole, talent hunger, a tsunami of money and heat.

Although it has to be said Dembélé’s streak is incredible. The numbers? They are delicious. Eighteen goals in 10 games. Back-to-back hat-tricks a fortnight ago. A goal in every game in 2025. A player whose finishing was seen as a weakness (his previous 18 goals took 105 games) is scoring with every third shot.

There are obvious caveats. Ten of those goals have come in five games against Monaco and Brest. Paris Saint-Germain have a tough schedule coming up, starting with Toulouse tonight. But it is also tactically interesting, a result of cause and effect. Luis Enrique has found a good role for him as a false 9 just in front of Vitinha, another PSG survivor who also happens to be the best midfielder in Europe these days. Dembélé can apply his movement, dribbling and two-footedness in the narrowest areas. He can finally be the star, have an attack moulded around him.

This has been a delayed process. When he might have been finding his best role Dembélé was trapped in football, spending his formative years as a side-commodity at superstar teams. You could construct a complex flowchart of the way football shunted him around in those years. German talent capitalism took him to Dortmund. The Neymar money wrenched him out to Spain. The same Qatari will-to-power took him to Paris. Saudi expansionism has removed Neymar and thrust him to the front of this team.

Dembélé had a lot of harsh words thrown at him during that time. “He does not have his life in his hands,” was the verdict of his private chef, the fourth one Barça hired, which feels significant because there was so much focus, specifically, on his intake During the Menace To Society Years. The lasting image was Dembélé surrounded by junk-food wrappers, “a coffee table covered in snacks”, empty quarts of fizzy drink. One of his chefs cooked him a fish and it was left to rot in the middle of the floor.

Basically, he was Sterlinged in this period. Here we have a young black footballer, at an age when most young men are frankly heinous (meet: students) being portrayed as a kind of urban savage, untamed man, undeserving wealth, talent without discipline.

This is what football will do to youthful talent, extreme rewards in return for extreme gravity, plucking you out of the asphalt cage into a place where suddenly Messi is your teammate and you’re the third-most-expensive footballer ever, where even the mark, the colour, the semiotics of the car you escape from training in (black G-wagon) is a corporate happening.

In many ways this is a redemption arc, another narrative plonked down on a bloke just trying to score some goals. On the other hand, maybe we could just let him be good without having to mean something.