This is a criticism that has been made to him since he played football, or almost. Extraordinary dribbler, dynamite, Ousmane Dembélé suffers from a cruel lack of efficiency in front of goal. Scoring is not his primary function, that’s for sure, but a player of his level must ensure a minimum performance in this area. And he knows it. “I don’t judge my performances on a goal scored. You can score a goal and be bad in the match. You can not score and be very good. But, in 2023, it is the statistics that count,” he said in a long interview given to The Team this Tuesday morning.
The former Barça winger, very likely to start during PSG’s trip to AC Milan in the evening, does not make it an obsession however. “It doesn’t bother me. I sleep very well at night, I always have confidence in myself,” he assures. He sticks to the content of his performances, he who is probably coming off his best match in Parisian colors on Saturday against Montpellier (3-0). “I have to make more assists and be even more dangerous. But scoring a goal and being bad in the match, that doesn’t interest me,” he says again.
Dembélé still identified with his coach Luis Enrique how he could be more effective. A question of lucidity which evaporates at the end of the effort, he who often has to start from afar and eliminate one or two players before being able to try anything. “I need to be a lot calmer,” he admits.
PSG, a kind of obvious
The player trained in Rennes also talks about how his transfer went last summer in this interview. He who was coming out of the “two best years” of his career under the orders of Xavi, a coach who never had anything but kind words for him, did not hesitate for long to board the Parisian train. Kind of obvious.
“It was a bit written that I would sign for PSG one day,” he believes. I have a lot of friends, supporters of the club, who always tried to convince me to come. » But Kylian Mbappé is not one of them, I swear: “There was not even a call. He asked me if I was going to come, that’s all. We came to PSG because we love the club, because it’s in France, too. »