Dembele was the best player for the best team last season. More often than not, ticking both boxes is enough to guarantee a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted ball for the mantlepiece.<\/p>\n
Before last season, his latent talent was obvious, but a frustrating lack of consistency meant the 28-year-old was never \u2014 until now \u2014 even included in the 30-man shortlist for the award.<\/p>\n
Luis Enrique emphatically unlocked these talents by shifting Dembele forward to the No 9 position. <\/p>\n
There, his whirring, dynamic movement, bewitching dribbles and sharpened ball-striking made him the perfect spearhead for a dizzyingly talented PSG squad.<\/p>\n
Kylian Mbappe, whose departure helped facilitate this tactical change, is unequivocal about his compatriot\u2019s credentials for the top prize, telling French broadcaster TF1, \u201cIf it were up to me, I\u2019d deliver it to his house.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dembele was the best player for the best team last season. More often than not, ticking both boxes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-162428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}