Fresh from winning the Ballon d’Or, Ousmane Dembélé has added another major individual honour to his collection by being named FIFA men’s player of the year for 2025.
The French winger claimed the The Best FIFA Men’s Player Award after an outstanding season in which he played a decisive role in Paris Saint-Germain’s treble-winning campaign. He finished ahead of Lamine Yamal and Raphinha to win the award for the first time.
The The Best FIFA Football Awards ceremony was held on Tuesday night in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where Dembélé was announced as the winner at a glittering event.
This year’s ceremony followed a slightly different format. Traditionally, FIFA announces winners in other categories first before revealing the men’s and women’s player of the year awards at the end of the show. This time, however, the winners of the best goalkeeper award, the Puskás Award for best goal and the FIFA Fair Play Award were revealed before the main ceremony began.
Although Dembélé was widely seen as the frontrunner, a degree of uncertainty remained until the final announcement. Over the assessment period, from 11 August 2024 to 2 August 2025, he was clearly ahead of the rest, delivering consistently decisive performances. He was the driving force behind PSG’s historic Champions League triumph and helped the club secure four trophies overall.
Dembélé scored 35 goals in 53 matches across all competitions, including eight in the Champions League, as PSG lifted the trophy for the first time in their history. He also provided 16 assists, underlining his influence in the final third.
During the same period, he helped PSG win Ligue 1 and the French Cup. In the French Super Cup, a one-off title decider, the former Barcelona forward scored the only goal of the match to seal victory.
The assessment window also included the inaugural 32-team FIFA Club World Cup. Dembélé missed all three group-stage matches through injury but returned in the knockout phase, scoring one goal each in the quarter-finals and semi-finals to guide his team to the final. PSG, however, were beaten by Chelsea in the title match.
That solitary disappointment did little to dent Dembélé’s case, as he capped a remarkable year by being crowned the world’s best men’s footballer by FIFA.
