“I arrived at the training without saying a word,” he recalls “he crossed with me and did not even give me the good morning. It was as if I had never learned to socialize. But he began to play and had everything. Requise, imagination, speed, vision, pass, goal, goal … There was a.
In 2016, Thomas Tuchel had a heart when he saw that 19 -year -old mysterious boy who had just arrived at Borussia Dortmund from Stade Rennais. Son of immigrants from Senegal and Mauritania based in Normandy, it was so shy that he did not dare to pronounce a word, much less in English or German. A decade later, Media France wants to see him converted into the first French gold ball in history that gets the title playing in a French club after, which raised the European Cup with the Olympique de Marseille in 1991.
“¡Ousmane Ballon d’Or! ¡Ousmane Ballon d’Or…! ”The fans stationed in the Roland-Garros tier were caught, the day Dembélé appeared on the central track to offer them the Europe Individuals, Dembélé always treated his star condition with indolence and an apparent lack of ambition that caused his classmates to laugh.
Dembélé didn’t believe it. It was the first week of June and had just been named a best player of the last edition of the Champions League after becoming the most decisive footballer in the history of the PSG in a season of European competition (eight goals and six assists) marked by the beauty of the collective game deployed by the team directed by Luis Enrique. Along the way he had demolished the City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Aston Villa, steps of an unparalleled difficulty in the last edition painting. The most logical thing was that the magazine France Footballorganizer of the vote, he asked if he wanted to win the Golden Ball. He replied with his natural stupor: “I hope to be among the 30 nominees!” Never before entered the list.
This Monday closes the vote and according to the first polls, Dembélé, Vitinha and Lamine Yamal are the most voted candidates. In Paris there are no doubt. The coach, Didier Deschamps, has already pronounced, to the detriment of Mbappé. The most popular soccer player in the Republic is the one who inspires the most sympathy between colleagues and fans, perhaps because he is the first who does not take his condition of figure very seriously. His instant success in social networks was involuntary. Without pretending, because he refuses from the celebrity, the videos accidentally recorded on his adventures cause furor since he played in Rennes and a television reporter, curious about the ability he showed with both legs, asked him if he was left -handed or right. “I’m left -handed,” he said, “but I use the right leg because I love it.”
He had just won the World Cup in Moscow and a partner with a mobile recorded while he was concentrated on a laptop, in the seat of the plane that took the team back to Paris. “I am playing the Football Manager,” he said, with that air between distracted and tormented that projects his brilliant look and his erratic lexicon. “I want to take the Winchester FC to the top. But I am not a businessman!”
The departure of Kylian Mbappé of the PSG in last summer, opened the doors to the goal and towards the economization of the game. Perhaps to avoid those episodes that so many times they discovered by driving the ball in search of increasingly inconceivable solutions in the left end, Luis Enrique requalified him as a center forward and simplified his references. “The efforts of a nine They are not the same as in the band, “Dembélé explained.” When you arrive in front of the goal you are cooler. Many times you just have to finish. Do the tap-in, push it to a touch. When you receive the ball on the court axis you just have to delete one or two players before finishing or attend. In the band you have to pass the side that marks, the pivot, the central … When you reach the area you no longer have that lucidity. In the middle it is much easier. Above all, when the team plays collectively and your classmates help you. ”
Diet improvement and personal care habits
Dembélé modestly explained his monumental figures: 35 goals and 16 assists in 53 games in all competitions played last year. Without vitinha, without neves, without Fabian and without Kvarathskhelia, superlative administrators of PSG football, the explosion would have not had an impact. He recognizes him in the same way that he admits that his time in Barcelona, between 2017 and 2023, served to learn to take care of himself. “I became more professional in the diet, in my life,” he says. He understood that if he insisted the hours he had to dedicate to sleep to apoltronize on the sofa of his house eating pizza, consuming electronic games and submerged on YouTube compulsively (“I see dictators’ documentaries and World War II,” he said) his muscular lesions would be chronicled. From Paris they reveal a detail: when he married, two years ago, his life as a careless teenager was interrupted. “He left a mustache,” says Javier Pietro-Santos, editor chief of the magazine So Foot, “And I don’t know if it was coincidence, but his life changed. He matured. But in the field it is joy, nobody knows what he is going to do, and neither is he unstable, he is unpredictable, it is funny, he is not calculating. This detached spirit made him gain positions in the ranking of the most beloved French in France.”
At 28, with spiritual maturity, he reached physical fullness. As Ramón Plans said, the one who was Barcelona’s sports director: “Dembélé needs to train a lot because he is a superatheleta. He is a Ferrari; if you don’t put it very ready, he breaks.”
Raymond Kopa in 1958, Michel Platini in 1983, 1984 and 1985, Papin in 1991 and Zidane in 1998 preceded him. With a little luck, the chosen one of the town of Paris can become the most unexpected Golden Ball.
