Ousmane Dembélé & Christian Pulisic: Dortmund's odd couple

Two wonderkids, one dressing room

It is easy to forget now, given how differently their stories have unfolded, that Dembélé and Pulisic arrived at Dortmund within months of each other as teenage prospects still finding their feet. Pulisic had been promoted to the first team in January 2016, already the youngest player in Bundesliga history to score two goals in a match, a precocious American product of Dortmund's academy. Dembélé joined that summer from Rennes, a £25million-ish signing fresh off being compared to Cristiano Ronaldo by his old sporting director. For one season, these two very different kinds of prospect, the homegrown wonderkid and the expensive new arrival, were team-mates.

A shared trophy, a shared breakthrough

The 2016–17 campaign is the season that connects them forever in the record books. Dortmund won the DFB-Pokal that year, beating Eintracht Frankfurt 2-1 in the Berlin final, with Dembélé scoring the opener and being named man of the match after also scoring the winner in the semi-final against Bayern Munich. Pulisic was a mainstay of that same cup-winning squad, having broken into the senior team the previous season and continued to establish himself through 2016–17, scoring and assisting across the campaign including a goal in that year's DFL-Supercup. Both were named to a version of Dortmund's breakthrough generation that season, Dembélé picking up the Bundesliga Rookie of the Season award, Pulisic already being talked about as one of the most exciting teenagers in Europe.

Their paths out of Dortmund, though, ran in opposite directions almost immediately. Dembélé left first, in the summer of 2017, for a fee that made him the joint-second most expensive player in the world at the time, bound for Barcelona and the shirt vacated by Neymar. Pulisic stayed on for another year and a half before his own departure in January 2019, to Chelsea, in a deal that was, at the time, Dortmund's second-biggest sale in history, behind only Dembélé's.

Different cities, different stories

What followed diverged even further. Dembélé's Barcelona years were injury-interrupted and, by his own admission, short of the hype that greeted his arrival, though he still collected three La Liga titles and two Copa del Reys before finding a genuine late-career peak back in France with Paris Saint-Germain, crowned Ballon d'Or winner in 2025 after inspiring a continental treble. Pulisic's Chelsea spell carried its own version of that arc: moments of real quality, a Champions League winner's medal in 2021 as the first American to play in that final, but also persistent injury trouble that dogged four seasons in west London. It was only after leaving for AC Milan in 2023 that he rediscovered the form that had once marked him out as a teenage phenomenon, becoming the club's top scorer and the face of American soccer in Europe.

Why the pairing still surprises

Neither man is remembered today for Dortmund first. Dembélé belongs to Barcelona's gilded, frustrating era and now to PSG's treble-winning present. Pulisic belongs to Chelsea's Champions League triumph and to Milan's resurgence, and above all to the United States national team, where he carries a weight of expectation few American players have known. But for one season, before the records fees and the global narratives took hold, they were simply two young wingers in the same Bundesliga squad, winning a domestic cup together before their careers scattered to different corners of Europe.