Ousmane Dembélé, the 28-year-old forward for Paris Saint-Germain and the French national team, now has an impressive record after winning the Champions League last season. Could he lose his motivation? He addressed this question in an interview with Onze Mondial this Thursday.
Dembélé: “Great champions don’t win just once.”
“You’ve won the Champions League and the World Cup, the two most important trophies in football. What motivates you now?”
“When you’re a competitor, you always want to win. You can win the World Cup, the Champions League, but in August, everything starts from scratch.
You can win one season, but if you don’t win the next, people forget everything or they say, ‘It was just luck.’ They’ll also say, ‘They’ll only win once and that’s it.’ We want to become great champions, and great champions don’t win just once, they win two, three, four times.”
Of course, there can be a slight letdown after winning such an important title. Especially since it was kind of “the one that was missing” for Dembélé. We’ve seen players decline afterward, perhaps relaxing their standards or their commitment. This was a concern for this Paris team, which has just made history.
However, Dembélé’s message is clear and aligns with what we’ve heard from club president Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, coach Luis Enrique, and other players. The desire to win is still there. The 2024-2025 season isn’t the end. It’s a great milestone, which should lead to more victories. In fact, we’ve seen this determination since the start of the season. There’s never a guarantee of winning, and the competition will be extremely tough this season. But we can be fairly certain that this team still has the ambition to make history. And that means winning more titles, as Dembélé rightly points out.
