Ousmane Dembélé quietly becomes the main man after long journey to the top

W hat makes a good player great, and a great player the best? This question has been occupying me since 2014, when the Guardian first asked me to contribute to its inaugural Next Generation feature . My job was to look for a France-based talent born in 1997 who could go on to have a stellar career. After a great deal of research, I narrowed it down from my shortlist of five by asking questions not about the players’ football ability, but about other attributes: resilience, adaptability, decision-making, creativity, work ethic, response to feedback and willingness to learn. Qualities we cannot see, and are harder to measure. Based on those answers, one player stood out above all the others: a kid called Ousmane Dembélé, then a youth player yet to make a first-team appearance at Rennes. Eleven years after appearing in these pages as one to watch, Dembélé has been voted the best male player in the world by the Guardian’s 219-strong voting panel. Those intangible qualities were in full effect on the night Dembélé made good on his years of promise. The defining image of Paris Saint-Germain’s 5-0 win over Inter in the 2025 Champions League final was not the trophy lift, or any one of the goal celebrations, but Dembélé, poised on the edge of the opposition penalty area, with hunched demeanour and furrowed brow, his face a picture of focus, ready to press. Just how did he get to this point? One lesson to learn from the Dembélé story: the path to greatness is not always linear. …