If Mauricio Pochettino was the manager Tottenham Hotspur couldn’t get over, Mousa Dembele was, and in some respects still is, the playing equivalent.
Next month, it’ll be five years since Dembele left, yet he remains as revered at Spurs as ever — holding a semi-mythological status and still the bar for technical excellence new players have to clear. Tanguy Ndombele, Yves Bissouma and even Dejan Kulusevski, in the eyes of some people, were and are measured against him when talking about their ball-carrying skills or ability to evade pressure.
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Among Dembele’s former team-mates, it’s almost reached levels of parody how revered he is.
A compilation that went around on social media this week of players talking about Dembele was pretty typical — Danny Rose and Dele Alli saying he was the best player from that Spurs team. Kyle Walker, who has won everything in the game with Manchester City, saying, “Dembele was probably the best player I’ve ever seen play football.” Kieran Trippier, subsequently of Atletico Madrid and now with Newcastle United, saying, “The GOAT (greatest of all time)? Dembele. You could say Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, but this guy, when I played with him at Tottenham, is the GOAT.”
What was it then that made Dembele so special? Eric Dier offers a clue in that same compilation, with his line from 2015 that, “He’s a monster and he’s got ballerina feet at the same time.” Elsewhere in that interview, Dier also calls Dembele, a close friend of his, “a freak of nature”, and it became a running joke on UK TV’s hugely popular Saturday morning show Soccer AM around then that every Spurs player they asked to name the best individual at the club chose the Belgian midfielder.
Every single Spurs player we've interviewed says Dembele is the best player at the club!
Is he the most underrated player in the Premier League? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/McPrmButGZ
— Soccer AM (@SoccerAM) February 20, 2018
Bear in mind as well this was the peak of the Pochettino era, when Harry Kane, Dele, Christian Eriksen et al were helping take the team to new heights.
His blend of the physical and technical gifts was what set Dembele apart, and made him so lionised by team-mates and fans. Not to mention Pochettino, who called him a “genius” on more than one occasion.
As for his enduring popularity, part of it might come down to the fact that Dembele’s time at Spurs was cut short because of injuries. And even when he was at his peak, there was always a worry that the next lay-off might not be far away. He never made more than 30 league appearances in a season for Spurs, and Pochettino spoke about how he wished he’d started working with Dembele earlier in his career. Those missed games, the premature exit when he was only 31, add to the mystique — the sense that he could have been even better.
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Even now, with Tottenham in a better place under Ange Postecoglou, their team would be immeasurably improved with a prime-years Dembele in it.
Bissouma started this season brilliantly — inevitably earning Dembele comparisons in the process — but he has tailed off, and isn’t as secure as Dembele was in possession when driving from deep positions (see the recent turnover that led to a goal at Manchester City). But then, really, no one can do what Dembele did: that ability to seemingly effortlessly glide past players from a standing start anywhere on the pitch. His team-mates used to marvel at that ability to dribble past opponents so easily, and they found that even in training, when they knew what he was going to do, they couldn’t stop him.
But how did he go from a relatively unremarkable player for most of his career to exploding when he came to Tottenham? What was he like off the pitch? And was he really as good as the legend suggests?
Just a few weeks shy of five years on from his departure, it’s time for a proper deep dive into the legend of Mousa Dembele at Spurs.
Dembele, son of a Malian father and a Flemish mother, was part of Belgian football’s ‘golden generation’, which also included Vincent Kompany, Eden Hazard and Romelu Lukaku.
Not that Dembele was expected to be at the level of those other three. He was good, but wasn’t thought to be that good.
Bob Browaeys, who still works with the Belgium youth sides, was technical coordinator for their football association and managed Dembele at under-17 level. Browaeys remembers him as a gifted player, but one who initially wasn’t as determined as some of his peers.
“When he started playing under-17s with the national team, you could see he was very skilful,” says Browaeys, who oversaw the development of that golden generation. “But he was also a bit late to fully develop mentally — for him, it was just a game at that point. But from the moment he came into the under-17s, he started to really make a difference and start performing. At that age, often players change their mentality and personality, and become more serious — working hard in training sessions and games. This is what happened with Dembele.
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“We saw that he was so skilful, but it takes a bit of time to perform.”
One of the stories about Dembele’s formative years was that the football pitches he played on growing up didn’t have any goalposts and so ‘goals’ would be scored by stopping the ball on a line at the end of the pitch and turning. Apocryphal perhaps, but it’s used as a way of helping to explain Dembele’s incredible ability to turn quickly with the ball at his feet.
Dembele’s talents did not go unnoticed. He joined Dutch side Willem II shortly before his 18th birthday and instantly became a first-team regular. Playing as a striker in the 2005-06 season, he scored nine goals in 33 Eredivisie games for a team that barely avoided relegation. He then joined AZ Alkmaar, and here he was reunited with old friend Jan Vertonghen, who was by then playing for Ajax.
The pair first met when a 12-year-old Vertonghen moved to Antwerp, where Dembele grew up, and in Amsterdam (Alkmaar is a 45-minute drive north) they found themselves living 100 yards apart.
Dembele played more as a winger for AZ and after four years there moved to the Premier League, signing for Fulham in summer 2010. It wasn’t until the arrival of former Spurs manager Martin Jol at Craven Cottage the following year that Dembele was converted to a midfield role.
“I knew they had bought him for the wing or as a striker,” Jol said in 2018. “But when I saw him in training, when he dropped off they could not get the ball off him. He recovered the ball all the time because of his strength, so I thought if he played in midfield he would probably be OK. But you never know, so I tried.
“From that moment on, he was our best player. I have never seen a transition like that before.”
Dembele started doing extra work specifically on protecting the ball while under pressure. It became his superpower and one of the things that made him stand out after Tottenham bought him. “It was a case of when practice met opportunity,” says one of his former coaches to explain how he became the player he did at Spurs.
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There was interest from Manchester United but in the summer of 2012, Dembele crossed London from west to north for £15million, having impressed against Tottenham for Fulham in the final game of the previous season.
His Spurs career was a slow burn. During the first couple of seasons, under the management of Andre Villas-Boas and then Tim Sherwood, there were some good performances but little to suggest Dembele would become such an imperious performer.
It still wasn’t really clear what his best position was, or how exactly he should be used. Though Sherwood did later recall that while he was in charge, for the second half of the 2013-14 season, some of Dembele’s team-mates would laugh at how they couldn’t get the ball off him in training sessions. “When I was his manager, I felt secure every time the ball was passed into him,” Sherwood added.
Even after Pochettino arrived in the summer of 2014, things did not click immediately for Dembele. He only started 10 league games in the Argentinian’s first season, and was behind Ryan Mason (29 league starts) and Nabil Bentaleb (25) in the midfield pecking order.
At the time, he was not deemed physically or mentally ready to play the kind of football Pochettino wanted to play, his preparation deemed not good enough. Dembele is not alone in taking time to adapt to Pochettino’s methods, and it does make you wonder how differently things could have been for Ndombele had the manager who signed him stayed longer than a few months before being sacked.
What, then, changed for Dembele in his second season?
Those who were there, including Pochettino, say a big shift came, both physically and mentally.
Starting with the former, there was a view in Pochettino’s first season that Dembele couldn’t cope with the intensity his new manager demanded. Mentally, Dembele developed his ability to cope with the demands of playing regularly for a club where the pressure is on. He also benefited from better structures and systems on the pitch, as the Pochettino project started to come together.
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Within the right framework, Dembele, by then 28, was showing he could shine, and he was emerging as one of the most important elements of Pochettino’s highly physical, rigorously drilled team.
There were plenty of players in that Tottenham side who could pass, but he was someone who could carry the ball, win it back, easily make space for himself and, crucially, allow his team-mates to get back into their very defined positions while he held onto possession.
The security provided by Dembele in front of their defence also meant Spurs could largely play a game in the opponents’ half of the pitch — something that was vital to Pochettino’s aggressive way of playing, and something that current manager Postecoglou is also trying to implement.
“With someone like him in the team, that calming influence, that could really take us up a pitch and keep us in the opposition half all game,” then-team-mate and still Spurs defender Ben Davies told The Athletic in 2021. “That was what we did at that period when we were really dominant in the game, and it’s games I remember where I had maybe two defensive actions the whole game. The rest were just up in the opposition half and you could just look to him to get the ball to and drive us forward.
“A special player. When the ball was at his feet, it was like nothing I’ve seen. He could just keep it at will. Teams would sometimes come and press us and he would just get the ball off Hugo (Lloris, the goalkeeper) with pressure and turn and run past someone; people don’t realise how hard that is or how easy he made it look. An awesome player.
“Knowing that if ever you were stuck, you could just roll the ball to him and he’d always get you out of trouble was a real blessing.”
That 2015-16 season is when the legend of Dembele really started to build.
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“I always, always say it — the best player ever,” Kevin Wimmer, a central defender who joined Spurs that pre-season, told The Athletic in October in reference to Dembele. “This guy could easily play for Real Madrid in his prime and still be one of the best players, So much class, never loses the ball, even if he has two or three opponents.
“He was just so strong and technical, and his left foot was good. He was fast. He was so important for us, and also for me; when he was playing as No 6 in front of me, you always knew you are safe. Because if there’s no options, there’s always the option to play to Mousa.
“In training, when we did four-a-side games and tournaments, when you were playing with Mousa, you know you were going to win. His team will always win. (Which is) Crazy, because we had so much quality in the team. He made it look so easy, and a lot of fun, playing football.
“Sometimes players are amazing in training but then the game is different because there’s more pressure, it’s faster. But he was always the same.”
Others who saw Dembele up close talk about his capacity to come up with something to surprise you. In general, there was a lot of affection for Dembele at Spurs.
“He could be a lazy so-and-so,” says one former colleague. “But he was the kind of personality you’d laugh at because you knew that was just how he carried himself. In a way, he showed that on the pitch as well — he could look a bit lazy, but then when he got on the ball it was just like, ‘This guy is unbelievable’.”
Another colleague from that time, who also asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, says: “He was very relaxed and calm off the pitch and he kind of played like that — he’d lure you in by looking lazy, and then drop the shoulder and spin you. We never saw him go full pelt in training unless it was something like two-v-twos or three-v-threes, and then he’d run the show. He’d used his body so well that in tight areas you just couldn’t get the ball off him.”
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Dembele, whose mother was a professional painter, was never especially interested in watching other people play football, and he once listed musicals and acoustic guitar among his “diverse” interests.
He was part of the group at Tottenham, which also included his friends Vertonghen and Dier, to regularly play the strategy board game Catan. He cared a lot about the team but was able to brush off defeats, and since retiring from football last year, aged only 34, he has kept his distance from the sport. He did not respond to interview requests for this piece.
After that breakthrough in 2015-16, when Spurs battled with Leicester City for the title before finishing third, Dembele went up another few gears.
Tottenham finished with 86 points in 2016-17, winning 17 and drawing two of their 19 home league games. They were unbeatable on that tight White Hart Lane pitch with the hugely imposing Dembele and Victor Wanyama in midfield, supported by Dier. Even away from it, they were extremely hard to stop: of the 51 Premier League matches Dembele started across those two seasons, Spurs lost just four — away games at Manchester United (twice), Liverpool and Chelsea.
There were many stars in that team — Kane, Dele and Eriksen, with Son Heung-min starting to emerge — but Dembele was key.
Pochettino spoke adoringly of Dembele during this period. At the start of 2016-17, when he was completing a six-game suspension for his role in the ‘Battle of the Bridge’ at the end of the previous campaign, Pochettino joked, “Without Mousa Dembele, we do not exist. Tottenham does not exist.”
Maybe not quite that extreme, but Spurs did drop four points in the first four matches while Dembele was still banned — had he been available for the 1-1 draws at Everton and home to Liverpool, maybe they could have got that bit closer to Antonio Conte’s Chelsea, who finished seven above them to win the title.
Pochettino was soon at it again, describing Dembele as a “genius” after an outstanding performance in a 1-1 draw away at Arsenal that November despite carrying an injury. He expanded on this the following March and hailed the Belgian as one of the five “genius players” with whom he had ever worked — along with Diego Maradona, Ronaldinho, Jay-Jay Okocha and Ivan de la Pena.
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At around the time of those five “genius players” comments, Dembele was becoming more of a leader for Pochettino. After a disappointing 0-0 draw away at struggling Sunderland in January 2017, it was Kane, captain Lloris and Dembele who were summoned to the manager’s office to pass on a message to the rest of the squad that some of them had not been good enough on the night.
Dembele was extremely popular with his team-mates, and Dier, among others, remains a close friend. When the pair were on holiday together in the French resort of Saint Tropez last year, Dier posted a picture of them on Instagram with the caption, “I played alongside him in a 3v3 in the garden yesterday, it was funny to remember what it was like to steal a living.”
But there was a sting also to those “genius” comments, because Pochettino added after comparing Dembele to Maradona, Ronaldinho and company that he “always told him, ‘If we had taken you at 18 or 19 years old, you would have become one of the best players in the world’. I would have loved to have taken him on at 18.”
Pochettino was well aware that, by then aged 29, and constantly battling injuries and fighting pain, Dembele probably didn’t have that much longer left at the top. He suffered a lot, and his ankles were an ongoing concern.
Again, this idea of being struck down when at his peak and not really getting the praise he deserved until afterwards adds to why Dembele is such a compelling character.
As it turned out, his peak was surely a run of four consecutive games in January and February 2018 when he absolutely dominated the midfields of Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal in the Premier League, and then Juventus in the Champions League.
That run is given greater poignancy by the fact he never produced such a performance again in his career. Only a couple of months later, Dembele’s physical decline was apparent in a sluggish performance at Wembley as Spurs lost 2-1 to a limited United side in an FA Cup semi-final.
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In fairness, teams were wising up to the fact that to stop Tottenham playing, you had to stop Dembele. That January, after a 1-1 away draw against Newport County in the FA Cup third round, a leaked scouting report from the League Two side emerged that described Dembele as Spurs’ “best player by far”.
But as much as teams knew that, for a long time there was nothing they could do about it — just like those team-mates who Dembele would effortlessly glide past in training. Opposition midfielders such as Ross Barkley, while at Everton, and Crystal Palace’s James McArthur, were saying that he was the toughest player they had come up against.
There is a tendency though to mythologise certain players and certain games (some feel this has been done a bit with Dembele), and so as part of this piece, we watched back that Juventus vs Spurs game to see if he was quite as good as we think he was, whether he really was “another level” — as some of his colleagues remember him being that February night in Turin.
Studying a recording of the match, a 2-2 draw in the first leg of a last-16 tie, there’s no doubting how good that Dembele performance was.
After giving away a foul in the opening minute — a tendency that Newport scouting report also picked up on, incidentally — that leads to Juventus scoring, he is close to perfect.
As early as the seventh minute, he gives a snapshot of what he’s about.
Nipping in to win the ball off Sami Khedira in the Juventus half…
… driving forward with it…
… and playing a pass towards the penalty area that Dele doesn’t quite read (a rare misplaced pass from Dembele on a night when he was successful with 96 out of 101, at a rate of 95 per cent).
Four minutes later, with Spurs now trailing 2-0, Dembele picks the ball up deep in his own half. The Juventus players are wary of pressing him, so they stand off.
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Dembele drives forward and a drop of the shoulder loses Douglas Costa, sending him falling to the ground.
He then beats Miralem Pjanic, aided by a strong fending arm that he often used when going past players — almost like a rugby player’s hand-off.
Dembele has now covered around a third of the pitch and, after a one-two with Eriksen here, spreads the play wide to Erik Lamela, which leads to Kane almost getting a chance in the box. In total, Dembele attempted seven dribbles on the night, six of which were deemed completed.
There are so many examples of him making this type of run in the match, and one in the second half leads to the free kick from which Eriksen equalises.
On this occasion, he receives a Serge Aurier pass in his own half…
… before surging past future Spurs midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur (another who has been compared to Dembele), using that hand-off again, and finding Dier. The move ends with a foul on Dele.
Towards the end of the game, with Spurs holding on to a valuable draw, Dembele constantly makes himself available for passes — doing the thing Davies spoke about earlier of allowing the other players to have a rest while he holds onto possession. In one passage, spanning the 89th and 90th minutes, Dembele shows for a throw-in and then plays four passes in a move that sees Spurs hold onto the ball almost uninterrupted for more than 60 seconds to wind down the clock.
Stats showed Dembele had possession of the ball for 10.2 per cent of the entire match, and that he wasn’t dispossessed once. He had 116 touches, completed four out of four tackles, created two chances and made an interception. Coupled with those earlier mentioned passing and dribbling stats, it was nothing short of a midfield masterclass, and it came just three days after he had completely bossed the north London derby, where it took more than an hour, and 50 touches, before he gave the ball away.
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On UK broadcaster BT Sport’s post-match analysis of the Juventus game, one of the best English midfielders of the modern era, Steven Gerrard, hailed Dembele’s performance as “magnificent, terrific all night”. Gerrard’s former England team-mate and fellow pundit Rio Ferdinand added in the same show: “He’s doing it (the deep-lying midfielder role) better than anyone right now.”
Gerrard then chips in that, “I can’t remember him putting in a performance like that on that stage.”
Mousa Dembele vs. Juventus:
1️⃣1️⃣6️⃣ Touches
9️⃣9️⃣ Passes
9️⃣5️⃣% Pass accuracy
4️⃣ Tackles
2️⃣ Chances created
1️⃣ InterceptionMore touches, passes and tackles than any other Tottenham player.
Standout performer 👏 pic.twitter.com/F45LaIiQ5W
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) February 14, 2018
If “that stage” meant a Champions League knockout game, then this was inarguable, as this was Dembele’s first such match. His second came a few weeks later when Spurs lost the return leg 2-1 at Wembley, having led at half-time.
That defeat at Wembley turned out to be the final Champions League knockout tie of Dembele’s career. He left Spurs the following January, a month before they resumed the Champions League campaign that took them all the way to the final.
Dembele had actually been ready to leave the previous summer, only a few months after scaling those heights against Juventus. He had just finished third at the 2018 World Cup with Belgium — despite winning 82 caps, it was felt he never quite reached the same levels he did with Spurs — but didn’t think he could do another season playing high-intensity football in the Premier League. Juventus were interested, but Pochettino persuaded him to stay.
So he began the 2018-19 season with Spurs but he wasn’t a regular anymore, and his last action for the club was limping off with an ankle injury seven minutes into a 3-2 away win against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the November.
Two months later, despite Pochettino again trying to persuade him to stay, he joined Chinese Super League side Guangzhou R&F.
Even though Dembele was clearly diminished, some of his team-mates think selling him when Spurs did was a mistake. Trippier thinks it was the difference between Pochettino’s side winning a trophy and not.
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“The big one was selling Mousa Dembele that January,” Trippier told The Athletic in January 2022 when asked why the club had been going through a rough patch. “I think I can speak on behalf of the players who were there. In the dressing room, he was an unbelievable person and all the lads loved him, but on the pitch he was the kind of player who would make a couple of per cent difference. That’s what wins you things.
“It baffled me that they would sell him. I know he was going to be a free (transfer, with his contract expiring) in the summer, but with the things we were challenging for, I would have kept him there and then let him go. He was the difference between winning a trophy or not.”
Off the pitch and on it, Dembele was much missed. In many ways, he still is.
But his legacy remains, and there are still coaches at Tottenham who talk about wanting to produce a player like him. More broadly, there’s a view in football circles that Dembele contributed to the change in what is expected nowadays from central midfielders — the need to not just protect the ball under pressure but drive forward with it and start attacks.
Postecoglou absolutely sees the need for such a player in his system, and generally Bissouma has performed the role well this season. But he’s not as press-resistant as Dembele was, and is suspended anyway.
And with this being the season for miracles, just imagine having a fit, peak Dembele able to play one last game for Spurs.
(Top photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
