He holds the Ballon d’Or. He was named The Best FIFA Men’s Player of 2025. He has 35 goals in a single club season and a continental treble to his name. By every measure that football uses to rank its players, Ousmane Dembélé is currently the best in the world.
And yet, in all his appearances at World Cups and European Championships, he has never scored a goal.
That single fact is the most compelling story Dembélé brings to the 2026 football World Cup — and the reason this tournament feels, for him, like unfinished business on the grandest scale.
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What Makes Him Unguardable
Dembélé is 29 years old, born May 15, 1997, and plays as a right winger for Paris Saint-Germain. The description undersells the reality. He is the rare winger who is genuinely, completely two-footed — not merely comfortable on his weaker side, but lethal with both. Defenders cannot shade him inside or outside because either option leads to the same outcome.
His dribbling is chaotic by design. There is no predictable pattern, no signature move that a backline can study and prepare for. Lightning quick over short distances, deceptive in his body movement, he splits elite defences in tight spaces in ways that look impossible until he has already done it. Julian Nagelsmann called him unguardable. He was not exaggerating.
The Numbers Behind the Ballon d’Or
The 2024/25 season was the one that settled the argument for good. Dembélé scored 35 goals in all competitions for PSG, drove them to a continental treble — Ligue 1, Coupe de France, and the UEFA Champions League — and swept the Ligue 1 Player of the Year award. No winger in Europe came close to matching his numbers.
The 2025/26 season, heading directly into this World Cup summer, continued in the same vein: 20 goals across 40 appearances for PSG. He arrives in North America not on the back of a purple patch but as a player who has been operating at this level consistently for two straight years.
The One Blank on an Otherwise Perfect Record
This is Dembélé’s third World Cup. He was 21 when France lifted the trophy in Russia in 2018, a young squad member playing his first tournament. In Qatar in 2022, he was a starter — he played in the final as France came agonisingly close to retaining the title, only to lose to Argentina on penalties.
In neither tournament did he score a single goal. Across the World Cups and European Championships he has participated in — with 58 senior caps and 7 international goals to his name — he has never found the net in a major tournament match. The contrast with his club form is jarring. For a player of his quality, at the peak of his powers, that blank space in the record is the kind of thing that drives a footballer mad.
The Perfect Stage, Finally
France have been drawn into Group I. Dembélé will lead the line alongside Kylian Mbappé — the reigning World Cup holder alongside the reigning Ballon d’Or holder, on the same flank-to-flank attack. For opposition defences, the problem of stopping one immediately creates space for the other.
France open against Senegal on June 17, before facing Iraq and Norway in the remaining group matches. Deschamps has built one of the most powerful squads in French football history. Dembélé, surrounded by that quality and freed from the sole responsibility of carrying his team, has everything he needs to finally explode.
The Ballon d’Or sits on his shelf. The World Cup winner’s medal sits in a drawer somewhere. The tournament goal record sits empty. At 29, with France in the best shape they have been for years, this is his moment to write the final chapter of the story.
After carrying PSG to the very top of Europe with back-to-back Champions League titles, Dembélé is now looking to bring that same magic to the international stage. His ultimate mission this summer is to finally push France over the finish line and capture the one trophy that slipped right through their fingers last time in Qatar.
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