Mousa Dembele was a players’ player: a rare talent whose quality is best articulated by his team-mates.
Kyle Walker, who played alongside Dembele at Tottenham Hotspur for five seasons before joining Manchester City in 2017, said he was “probably the best player I have ever seen play football”, and he has lined up with and against some of the greatest of his generation. One is those is City’s Kevin De Bruyne, who incidentally described his former Belgium team-mate as “the best player in the world” at five-a-side. Former Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino ranked him in the “genius” bracket of those he had worked with, alongside Diego Maradona and Ronaldinho.
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Still, none of those statements are as eyebrow-raising as when Kieran Trippier, another ex-Tottenham colleague and a 54-cap England international, described Dembele as the greatest of all time — above Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — in an interview with Sky Sports.
On the surface, it appears a little ridiculous.
Messi and Ronaldo have 1,775 professional-level club goals between them; Dembele scored 65 times. Together, Messi and Ronaldo have 638 assists; Dembele managed 46. Messi and Ronaldo have collected 19 league titles combined (and almost as many continental-level club and national-team honours); Dembele won one.
You may say it is unfair to compare a deep-lying midfielder who rarely ventured within 10 yards of the opposition box with a duo who did most of their damage between the width of the goalkeeper’s posts. However, the fresh-faced 21-year-old who won the 2008-09 Eredivisie title with AZ was not the Dembele you probably remember.
“He joined us because our technical director, Martin van Geel, knew him from Willem II (another Dutch club),” says Edward Metgod, who was Louis van Gaal’s assistant coach at AZ in those days. “At the time, Shota Arveladze was the top guy in that position. They were different players. Incomparable.”
If you can believe it, that position was centre-forward.
Dembele signed for AZ in summer 2006 after one season with Willem II, who had finished second-bottom and only stayed in the top flight by beating second-tier sides FC Zwolle and De Graafschap in the relegation/promotion play-offs. After forcing his way into the starting line-up in the October, the Belgian led the line for the Tilburg-based side for most of that campaign, scoring nine goals in 33 regular-season appearances. His most impressive outing was in a 5-0 win over Groningen in the March, netting once and providing two assists.
Aged 18, scoring at a rate of nearly one in three was enough to put him on the radar of the Netherlands’ biggest clubs, including Ajax. He opted for Van Gaal’s AZ project instead of joining the Amsterdam giants, where his new manager soon spotted his miscategorisation as a striker.
“If you looked at his data, it was not the typical data of a striker or a target man,” says Metgod. “He could hold the ball unbelievably well, but scoring goals was not his key quality. In the beginning, I doubted whether he knew what he was doing or wanted to do with the ball. He was on the ball, turning left and right, holding players away from him, but he’d somehow find a solution because he was so strong. He was not the kind of player who knew his next pass before he got the ball, but he was so strong that nobody could pinch it.
“I remember on the training field the defenders saying, ‘What the hell is this? This guy is so strong! You cannot get the ball from this guy’.”
Dembele started his debut season on the fringes of Van Gaal’s starting XI. AZ, who face Tottenham over the next two midweeks in a battle of his former clubs in the Europa League’s round of 16, were pushing for the title after missing out by three points the year before, and the teenage newcomer had to settle for earning the lion’s share of his minutes from the bench. But Van Gaal began experimenting with Dembele alongside Arveladze in attack, dropping deeper and collecting the ball before embarking on the marauding dribbles that would become his trademark.
He solidified his place as a regular starter with a goal in a 3-2 win at PSV in the February, but AZ would again narrowly miss out on their first league championship since 1980-81. They finished third, four points behind both Ajax and PSV, with the latter winning the title on goal difference. After consecutive unsuccessful title challenges, Van Gaal rejigged things at the top of the pitch.
“He was not a real goalscorer, and that made playing in Arveladze’s position difficult,” says Metgod. “The season after, AZ signed strikers Ari and Graziano Pelle and (striker Danny) Koevermans left, and Van Gaal changed the system. There was also the competition of (Mounir) El Hamdaoui.”
In that 2007-08 season, Dembele was a regular starter and considered one of the Eredivisie’s brightest talents — but still without a nailed-on position. In April 2011, having joined Fulham from AZ the previous summer, he told MailOnline he had learned the game on a basketball court, where you scored by making the ball hit the pole that held up the hoop. Given his unconventional footballing education, it was no surprise he had not yet conformed to the structure of the professional game.
“Van Gaal was searching for a position for him because he had exceptional skills, but not as a striker,” says Metgod. “He wanted him in the team for his possession skills. That was something Van Gaal always thought was incredibly important — he thought about football with possession of the ball.”
He spent most of that season playing behind Ari and El Hamdaoui as a No 10 and scored three league goals in 33 appearances. It was the clearest indicator of the player he would eventually become in the Premier League and paved the way for Dembele to emerge as a key player for Belgium’s national team. However, AZ struggled, finishing 11th on 43 points, 29 behind champions PSV.
The following season, they would finally get over the hump as title winners, breezing home 11 points clear of runners-up Twente, with Dembele playing a key role.
“From the start, I could see this place is definitely going to be a platform, not his limit,” says Brett Holman, an Australia international midfielder who joined AZ before that triumphant 2008-09 campaign. “He was probably a head above the rest regarding technique, speed and balance.”
After what was his worst season in charge in 2007-08, Van Gaal again tinkered with AZ’s system, but Dembele remained integral. He alternated between a 4-4-2 diamond and a flat variation of the formation, where the Belgian started from the wing but had a free role.
“He was one of the first names on the team sheet, if not the first,” says Holman. “It sums up the player he was that Louis put the team out and was like, ‘Well, how can I fit Mousa in?’. It didn’t matter where he played because he was always that good.”
That speaks to his quality, as many of that 2008-09 side went on to achieve big things. Seven of the team later played in the Premier League, and several others had successful careers in other top European leagues and became established internationals.
After losing their first two league games of the league season, AZ got into their groove with a 1-0 home win over champions PSV in mid-September. It would be 29 matches before Van Gaal’s side were beaten in the Eredivisie again, collecting 76 points out of a possible 84. It was Dembele’s brightest start to a season yet, netting three times from the opening five matches, including two in a 6-0 win against Sparta Rotterdam. However, he sustained a torn meniscus in the second half of that game, which kept him out until the new year.
He returned to the starting line-up in the reverse fixture with Sparta in early February and marked it with a goal in a 2-0 win. A week later, he delivered his most memorable moment in an AZ shirt — a brilliant solo effort against his previous team, Willem II.
“Everyone’s seen it, where he runs past six or seven guys,” says Holman. “He just bounces off them all and probably beats one guy three times. That summed him up. That’s one goal where he stood out to me as a player on a different level. He was a different type of player to what was running around in the Dutch league at the time.”
He finished with 10 goals from 23 league games as AZ won the Eredivisie, qualifying for the following season’s Champions League, before moving to Fulham in summer 2010. It was not until Martin Jol replaced Mark Hughes as manager before Dembele’s second season at Craven Cottage that he moved into a deeper-lying midfield role.
“When I saw him in training, when he dropped off they could not get the ball off him,” Jol said in The Daily Telegraph in 2018. “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.”
Which prompts the question: why did this not happen sooner?
“If you look at him at Spurs and how he was at AZ, where he was more of an attacking player, he didn’t actually change much,” says Holman. “Even as an attacker, he was never that out-and-out goalscorer who would get you 20 goals; he was that type of guy who always kept the ball moving.
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“You knew that if you played the ball into him and had three guys around him, he’d never lose it. I felt he wasn’t that ‘real’ No 10, left winger or No 9. That wasn’t where he fitted in. When he went to Tottenham (in summer 2012), it made sense that those positions suited him a lot more, where he had a little bit more freedom with midfield, and he could do his damage from there.”
Re-inventing an international player as he entered his prime years was a brave decision, but it was proven a masterstroke.
Without it, one of the most uniquely brilliant midfielders in Premier League history may never have come close to realising his potential.
(Top photo: AFP via Getty Images)