Ousmane Dembélé Crowned World's Best Male Footballer as Guardian Panel Hails PSG Main Man
Ousmane Dembélé has been voted the best male player in the world by the Guardian's 219-strong voting panel, completing an unlikely journey that began more than a decade ago when he was flagged as a France-based talent to watch as a Rennes youth player still awaiting his first-team debut.
Eleven years after first appearing in those pages as a name for the future, the Paris Saint-Germain forward has risen to the summit of the world game — a rise the Guardian attributes as much to character as to talent.
The night that defined a career
The defining image of Paris Saint-Germain's 5-0 win over Inter in the 2025 Champions League final, the Guardian notes, was not the trophy lift or any one of the goal celebrations, but Dembélé poised on the edge of the opposition penalty area — hunched, brow furrowed, a picture of focus and ready to press.
It was a snapshot of the qualities that have quietly transformed him into the main man in Luis Enrique's side, a curious-motivated talent who starts the press and whose vision, movement, pace, control and positioning set the tone for the team. His finishing, once considered wasteful, is now described as ruthless.
From prodigy to puzzle at Barcelona
One lesson from the Dembélé story, the Guardian writes, is that the path to greatness is not always linear. He began at a sprint, winning France's young player of the year award in his first season as a professional, then helped Borussia Dortmund win the German Cup.
It was during that Dortmund spell that Thomas Tuchel, his coach at the time, offered a window into his character. Tuchel told the Guardian that Dembélé's talent came with an obligation and responsibility to improve, and bracketed players into three 'ABC' motivational categories. The 'A' stood for aggressive-motivated players driven by individual glory and awards, the 'B' for binding-motivated players who love being part of a group, and the 'C' for curious-motivated players — those, like Dembélé, capable of true greatness and who needed to be coached in a slightly different way.
In 2017 he moved to Barcelona, who were flush with money from selling Neymar for €222m (£194m). It proved a sliding-doors moment: that same summer the club changed coach, with Ernesto Valverde replacing Luis Enrique. Across six injury-laden years in Catalonia, Dembélé started only a third of the league games and scored 24 league goals in total. His most memorable moment, the Guardian suggests, may have been missing a last-minute one-on-one in the 2019 Champions League semi-final against Liverpool — after which Barcelona, 3-0 up, lost the second leg 4-0. When he finally left, amid mutterings of wasted talent and blackmail, it felt like a relief for all parties.
Liberated in Paris with no star to serve
There is a symmetry to his exceptional 2025. Of the 30 goals he had scored in the calendar year at the time of writing, the most decisive and emblematic was arguably his strike against Liverpool in the second leg of the Champions League last-16 tie. With PSG 1-0 down from the first leg, Dembélé drifted into his own half, losing markers who did not want to follow him that far, picked up the ball and spread it wide to the right-winger Bradley Barcola, then sprinted into the box to meet the cross and score. He also scored in the penalty shootout after PSG won 1-0 at Anfield.
He did something similar against Arsenal in the semi-final, dropping deep early, switching play to the left-sided Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and receiving the return ball unmarked on the edge of the area before scoring. Even when teams knew it was coming, they could not stop him.
At the start of the previous season, Luis Enrique's plan was for the whole team to replace the goals of Kylian Mbappé, who had joined Real Madrid — especially given Dembélé had not scored more than 10 league goals in a season since his debut campaign at Rennes. Luis Enrique wanted the team to be the star. With no star player to serve, Dembélé was liberated. This curious-motivated talent who once scored penalties with either foot, and even took corners with either foot, quietly became the main man.
What makes a good player great
The Guardian's contributor admits he still does not know exactly what makes a good player great, but feels closer to an answer. Part of the equation remains what cannot be seen: the chemistry within a team, the relationship with a specific coach, and playing in a system that brings out the best in every player.
But it is also those intangible qualities — resilience, adaptability, decision-making, creativity, work ethic, response to feedback and willingness to learn — that distinguished Dembélé at 17 and still do now. As the article concludes, this well-deserved prize is as much for those attributes as it is for his goals and the trophies he helped Paris Saint-Germain win.