Below is a summary of the full article. Click here for the full version or go back to LFC Live.net

In his age-18 season in France, he averaged 0.76 non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes.

0.75 non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes.



The only players in the Bundesliga who completed more were Robben and Franck Ribery for Bayern Munich.

Across the Big Five leagues, there were three players who averaged at least four successful take-ons per 90 minutes and four passes into the penalty area: Messi, Neymar and 19-year-old Ousmane Dembélé.

If we tweak the thresholds, we're left with this comfy little fact: In the 2016-17 season, only two players in Europe averaged at least 4.5 successful take-ons and 4.5 passes into the penalty area per 90 minutes: Neymar ...

Whatever the exact reasons, Dembélé was the fourth-most expensive transfer in the history of the sport, and he only played 44% of the available minutes for Barcelona across his six years with the club from 2017 to 2023.

Across those six seasons, he averaged 0.69 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes.

(He's since voided that contract to return to Brazil, where he's back where he started at Santos.) Barcelona, meanwhile, were still pulling as many levers as possible in order to replace some of their already good players with players basically just as good, so they allowed Dembélé to move back to France, to PSG, for €50m before the start of the 2023-24 campaign.

In his six seasons with Barcelona, Dembélé scored 24 goals and added 34 assists.

And the part that makes Dembélé the best player in the world right now is that he's scoring all of those goals -- and still doing everything he used to do.

He's completed 43 passes into the penalty area in 2025 -- tied for the seventh most among all players, while no one ahead of him has scored more than seven non-penalty goals.