Ousmane Dembélé’s ‘chosen one’ reply to Kylian Mbappé has pulled this year’s Ballon d’Or race out of the polling stage and into something a good deal more personal. Speaking after Paris Saint-Germain’s 1-0 win at Brest on Sunday night, the reigning holder answered a France Football interview in which his former Paris team-mate had drawn a line between the pair of them — and Dembélé did not pretend he had missed it.
What Mbappé said
Both men are nominated for the award, which Get French Football News reports will be handed out in London next month. Mbappé, now 27 and still without a Ballon d’Or, told France Football he liked his chances this time. Asked specifically about Dembélé, the France captain replied: “He has always been seen as a talented player; I have always been seen as the chosen one.”
It was of a piece with the case he has been making publicly for a fortnight, and which we covered when he argued there had been no better player than him last season. Framed as a compliment, it reads rather more like a ranking.
Dembélé’s ‘chosen one’ answer, word for word
Dembélé’s response came to Ligue 1 Plus a few hours after full time in Brittany. “I have always been at the back of the class, working hard,” he said, adding that he had gone his whole career without saying a word about it. He was never the chosen one, he went on — but he worked, and last year he was rewarded for what he called a fantastic season with PSG. This year, he said, he will take it “without pressure, calm”.
Read alongside his line earlier in the week that it remains an individual trophy, it is about as close to a barb as the 10 gets. The man who spent a decade being told he was squandering his gifts is not about to let the label pass unchallenged in the year he is defending the thing.
Why the timing lands
The awkwardness is in the scoreboard. Dembélé holds the trophy, and he won it in a season that ended with Paris retaining the Champions League. Mbappé, by GFFN’s account, put away 42 goals in 44 games for Real Madrid and passed Olivier Giroud to become France’s all-time leading scorer, yet finished the campaign without a major title. Individual brilliance against a second European Cup is precisely the argument the electorate is being asked to settle, and it explains why the voting system itself has had such a thorough airing this autumn.
A very Parisian ballot
Paris go into the ceremony with a record nine nominees, which is the other reason Dembélé keeps reaching for the word individual. He has already publicly tipped Khvicha Kvaratskhelia rather than himself, and there is a dressing room to keep level while the shortlist does its work.
The domestic season has not made that easier. Five points from four Ligue 1 games is not what a back-to-back European champion expects, and Sunday’s first league win of the campaign at Brest arrived through a Ferran Torres strike from 25 yards rather than anything from the front three. Dembélé’s own form is not the problem — he scored twice in the 6-1 dismantling of Slovan Bratislava on Champions League Matchday 1 — but the collective start has been ragged enough to sharpen every question put to him.
None of which changes the shape of next month. One of these two will be introduced in London as the best footballer of the last year, and the other will have to sit and applaud. On Sunday night, the boy from the back of the class made it fairly clear which outcome he has grown used to.
