Ousmane Dembélé has scored 18 goals in his last 11 games, including 10 in his last four. Is the Paris Saint-Germain star finally fulfilling his promise?
Football is full of stories of what might have been. Players from whom so much was expected just drifting off into relative irrelevancy, whether it be due to injury, attitude, or the initial hype simply being misplaced.
Ousmane Dembélé could have become another of those, but it was almost as if people couldn’t quite bring themselves to give up on him.
The 27-year-old has had a perfectly decent career, but there was a point when expectations of him almost couldn’t have been higher.
The French winger burst onto the scene at Rennes in the 2015-16 season, recording 12 goals and five assists in 29 games before a €35 million move to Borussia Dortmund three days before his 19th birthday.
After one season in Germany where he managed 10 goals and 21 assists in 50 games, he made a move to Barcelona in August 2017 for an eye-watering €135m as the de facto Neymar replacement following the Brazilian’s even more ludicrously-priced transfer to Paris Saint-Germain.
Funnily enough, it is now at PSG where Dembélé has finally stepped up to the levels many expected of him back then.
Things didn’t really work out at Barça, especially considering the hefty price paid for him. Though his 82 goal involvements (40 goals, 42 assists) in 185 games for the club is not to be sniffed at, Dembélé suffered with injuries and could never fully establish himself at the club as a result.
It appeared as though Dembélé would leave in quite a few transfer windows, but various managers kept being tempted to try and make it work. He ended up with eight goals and nine assists in 35 games (25 starts) in his final season, and at that point, then Barça boss Xavi seemed more than happy with him.
Dembélé finally left in August 2023 to return home to France, though. He had a respectable first season at PSG, with 12 assists in 42 appearances, though only six goals. However, two of those goals came against Barcelona in each leg of their Champions League quarter-final, showing his former club what they were missing. Xavi admitted after the first leg that Dembélé’s exit the previous summer had “left a bad taste” because he knew how good the player was.
This season, with Kylian Mbappé departing PSG for Real Madrid at the end of the 2023-24 campaign, head coach Luis Enrique needed someone to step up. That someone has proved to be Dembélé, who took his goal tally for the season to 23 goals in 28 games with his brace against Brest in the first leg of their Champions League knockout phase play-off on Tuesday. Quite an achievement considering he had never previously scored more than 14 in a single campaign.
Just three months shy of his 28th birthday, Dembélé seems to have finally hit his stride, not only scoring goals but doing so in a way that almost looks too easy. His first strike against Brest was steered inside the near post with such nonchalance that it looked like he had it on the ‘easy’ setting in a computer game.
Luis Enrique’s comments after the game were therefore quite appropriate: “Back when I played PlayStation as a kid, he was the kind of player you’d choose when you needed someone to change the game,” he said.
“He was already good last season but in 2025 he is even better. You can see his teammates looking for him and finding him. He has an impeccable attitude.”
The PSG boss isn’t wrong. Dembélé’s 2025 has been frankly stunning, scoring 15 goals in just eight games. Remember, prior to this season he hadn’t even scored that many in a whole campaign.
Since 1 January, Dembélé has scored at least five more goals than any other player from Europe’s top five leagues in all competitions, ahead of Mbappé (10), Mateo Retegui (9), Lautaro Martínez, Robert Lewandowski, Harry Kane and Erling Haaland (all 8).
Dembélé scored just five times in his first 17 games this season, and between late September and early December, had a run of 11 games in which he scored just once. Since then, he has found the net 18 times in 11 games, including scoring in each of PSG’s last eight.
That equals the best run in history for a PSG player along with Neymar (twice), Carlos Bianchi and Mbappé. Should Dembélé find the net at Toulouse on Saturday in Ligue 1, he will hold the record outright.
This recent run has included 10 goals in his last four games, with back-to-back hat-tricks against Stuttgart and Brest followed by back-to-back braces against Monaco and Brest again. It showed a significant rise in efficiency from Dembélé, who had failed to score from eight shots in the 1-0 win over Girona earlier in the season. His trebles against Stuttgart and Brest came from just five shots in each game.
Dembélé has just five assists to his name this season, and hasn’t registered any since early November. He has scored 18 goals since his last assist, suggesting a concerted focus on becoming more of a finisher than a creator.
In his first 17 games this season, Dembélé averaged 5.0 shots per 90 minutes, with an average xG per shot of 0.11. In his last 11 appearances, that has gone up to 5.6 shots per game and an xG per shot of 0.19, so he is getting slightly more shots away, but his proficiency seems to be mostly down to taking them in more promising positions, where he has a higher chance of scoring.
In fact, he didn’t register more than 1.0 xG in any game this season until the turn of the year, but has done so six times in eight games in 2025.
Much of this is likely due to a slight change in the way Luis Enrique has used him. In his first 17 games this season, Dembélé played 79% of his minutes on the right of the attack, and 16% as the central striker. In his last 11 games, he has played just 34% of his minutes on the right and 61% through the middle, and it is clearly making a difference.
As mentioned, Dembélé’s creativity has dipped a little in recent games. He averaged 3.6 chances created per 90 in his first 17 appearances this season, which has gone down to 2.7 in his last 11, but he is unquestionably his team’s most influential player in attack. He has played a part in 9.9 shot-ending open-play attacking sequences per 90 this season, with none of his teammates averaging more than 7.7 (minimum 450 minutes played).
Another interesting aspect of Dembélé’s goals is his ambidexterity. Of his 23 goals this season, Dembélé has scored eight with his left foot and 13 with his right, as well as two headers. His dribbling ability and pace can worry defenders when he’s running at them, but it becomes so much more difficult to combat when you genuinely have no idea which foot he’s going to shoot with.
It’s easy to forget that when he moved to Barcelona, many believed Dembélé would be the man to challenge Mbappé for future Ballon d’Or awards in the post-Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo era. That hasn’t yet materialised, but keep playing like this and there’s every reason to think Dembélé can be in the running this year.
He is leading a mouthwatering attack in Paris, alongside young talents like Bradley Barcola, Désiré Doué and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. It feels a world away from the Mbappé/Neymar/Messi era in the French capital, but equally as exciting.
Luis Enrique is right. Dembélé is playing like a character from a computer game. With the pace of Sonic the Hedgehog, the hunger of Pac-Man and the efficiency of Mario (when he wasn’t falling through holes… Mario, not Dembélé), he is frankly now a cheat code.
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