All eyes will be on Kylian Mbappe in Paris Saint-Germain's Champions League quarter-final first leg with Barcelona tonight, but Ousmane Dembele is also set to have a big role to play against his former side.
Mbappe, who will be in a Real Madrid shirt next season, has 39 goals for PSG in this campaign. Dembele has only one.
However, the player described by Le Parisien newspaper last week as a "tearaway" offers something different, even if Barcelona are all too aware of what the 26-year-old winger can do with the ball.
The French star returned to his home country last August after six seasons in Catalonia, with PSG paying a reported 50 million euros (HK$425 million) to sign him on a five-year deal.
Dembele was in a Barcelona shirt the last time the clubs met, in the last 16 in 2021, when Mbappe scored a hat-trick in the first leg in Catalonia. Their previous encounter was the memorable last-16 tie in 2017, when a Barca side coached by Luis Enrique - now the PSG manager - overturned a 4-0 deficit in the first leg to win 6-1 in the return.
Dembele scored 40 goals in 185 appearances for Barcelona, a much better strike rate than he has managed at PSG, where his only goal in 34 games to date came against Monaco in November.
"If he were a better finisher he might have won the Ballon d'Or," Julien Stephan, the current Rennes coach who worked with a teenage Dembele, said last week.
Dembele may really need to weigh in with more goals next season once Mbappe has departed, but for now he has at least provided more assists than any other player in France this season. However, the fleet-footed dribbler has been deployed in a withdrawn central attacking role in recent key matches - the Champions League last-16 second leg at Real Sociedad and the clash with fierce domestic rivals Marseille.
"I think we will see an even better version of Ousmane playing through the middle," said Luis Enrique. "I am not worried about him not scoring enough goals - he will improve. What he creates is very positive for the team and he is a player who almost can't be stopped."
Winger Ousmane Dembele offers something different to PSG. AFP
