Ousmane Dembélé, born in Vernon in 1997, won the 2025 Ballon d’Or after scoring 33 goals in a continental treble with Paris Saint-Germain. He is one of eleven players to have won the World Cup, the Champions League and the Ballon d’Or.
Masour Ousmane Dembélé was born on 15 May 1997 in Vernon, Eure, France. His mother is Mauritanian-Senegalese and his father is Malian. He began playing football between the ages of 12 and 13 in nearby Évreux, first at ALM Évreux and then at Évreux FC 27, before moving to Rennes.
He made his senior debut for Rennes’ reserve team on 6 September 2014 and scored his first goal in November. In his first season there he scored 13 goals in 18 games, including a hat-trick on 16 May 2015. He made his professional debut on 6 November 2015 in Ligue 1, scoring his first league goal against Bordeaux on 22 November. On 6 March 2016 he scored his first Ligue 1 hat-trick in a 4-1 win over Nantes, and he ended the season with twelve goals in 29 matches and the Ligue 1 Young Player of the Year award.
In 2016 he moved to Borussia Dortmund, where he won the DFB-Pokal in his first season and scored in the final. In 2017 he joined Barcelona for an initial €105 million, at the time the joint second-most-expensive player ever, alongside Paul Pogba and behind Neymar. He did not fully meet expectations, but he won three La Liga titles, two Copa del Rey titles and two Supercopa de España trophies.
He returned to France in 2023 with Paris Saint-Germain for €50.4 million. In 2024-25 he had a remarkable resurgence, contributing 33 goals and 15 assists in 49 appearances as PSG won a continental treble. He was named Ligue 1 Player of the Year, the 2025 UEFA Champions League Player of the Season and the Ligue 1 top scorer, and earned the 2025 Ballon d’Or. In 2025-26 he was Ligue 1 Player of the Year again and won another Champions League and league title.
For France, after 20 caps and five goals at youth level, he made his senior debut in 2016. He was in the France squad that won the 2018 World Cup, and appeared at Euro 2020, the 2022 World Cup in which France finished as runners-up, Euro 2024 and the 2026 World Cup.
After matchday 1 of the new Champions League season he was among the leading scorers with two goals, according to Khel Now, helping PSG beat Slovan Bratislava 6-1, the biggest score of the round. PSG now head to the Etihad to face Manchester City on Wednesday, the match billed as the pick of matchday 2, and Dembélé will be one of the players the home defence has to stop. At Rennes he had made his first-team debut on 6 November 2015 as a substitute for the last five minutes against Angers, and by 18 March 2016 had scored his tenth goal of the season in a 5-2 win at Marseille, the early signs of the player the world now knows.
Image: Ousmane Dembélé playing for France at the 2026 World Cup (file photo). Photo: Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
