11 Best Dribblers in World Football (2024)

There is a growing feeling that fun is fading out of football. The legendary Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa lamented the sport’s supposed ‘decline’ this summer, claiming that the spectacle “is becoming less and less attractive”.

Manchester City’s all-conquering manager Pep Guardiola, a noted Bielsa disciple, has been blamed by some for this perceived drop-off. Guardiola’s positional, possession-heavy system serves as the inspiration for coaches across the globe. A common misconception is that this style turns mercurial individuals into mindless cogs in a winning machine. Jack Grealish may have lost some of his verve, but the perennial Premier League champions do boast some of the best dribblers in the game today.

For all the doom and gloom, there is a fleet of wondrous weavers scattered across the elite level. You just have to know where to look. Here’s a rundown of the players who are railing against the misdirected idea of football’s decline.

Ranking Factors

• Quantity – The number of dribbles attempted and completed is a key factor when judging the world’s best.
• Level – Players who can dribble around elite defenders in the toughest competitions available have been ranked higher.
• Style – Beyond the cold, hard numbers, the most entertaining dribblers wriggle past their opponents with a balance of skill and speed.

11

Lamine Yamal

Barcelona

Spain’s triumphant manager at Euro 2024, Luis de la Fuente, hailed Lamine Yamal as “one of those players touched by God’s magic wand”. The proud Rocafonda native was cradled by a footballing deity when chance placed a baby Yamal in the same calendar photoshoot as Lionel Messi a decade ago.

Everyone associated with Barcelona is at pains to avoid direct comparisons between their teenage starlet and arguably the greatest player of all time, but the ease with which Yamal dances past opponents makes it hard not to join the dots. The Spanish sensation puts his dribbling ability down to a childhood spent reacting to the ball bouncing awkwardly off the cobbles in his neighbourhood.

10

Savinho

Manchester City

Pep Guardiola, the apparent architect of modern football’s supposed demise, is more interested in deceptive widemen than most managers. “Today football is losing the dribble,” he lamented on Spanish TV in 2022. “Without players who dribble, nothing can be done.” City’s head coach has subsequently recruited some of the best weavers in the game, with Savinho the latest trickster to arrive at the Etihad in the summer of 2024.

Girona reaped the rewards of Savinho’s mercurial talent during the 2023/24 campaign, spending much of the season at the table’s summit before eventually finishing in a record-breaking third place. “I know this is a big statement,” Girona’s boss Michel said last term, “but I hadn’t seen anyone so effective in one-on-one situations since Vinicius Junior emerged.”

9

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia

Napoli

Two games into his Napoli career, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia was already being compared to the greatest player ever to don the famous blue shirt. The Georgian winger’s new nickname, ‘Kvaradona’, was plastered across the front pages of Italian publications up and down the peninsula. The difficulty of pronouncing his name was a factor, but Kvaratskhelia’s endless bag of tricks was worthy of a nod to Diego Maradona, arguably the best dribbler of all time.

Che Kvara – as he is also known – poetically claimed that “freedom is my signature”, during a triumphant debut season in Italy, as Napoli won Serie A for the first time without Maradona. The entire squad suffered a steep decline in a feeble attempt to defend their title, but defenders still haven’t solved the conundrum of Kvaratskhelia, who recorded more take-ons at a higher success rate during his second Serie A campaign.

8

Nico Williams

Athletic Club

When Nico Williams burst into Athletic Club’s first team, the most common piece of advice that he received was simple: “Slow down.” The jet-heeled winger was a sensation for Spain at Euro 2024, attempting more take-ons than all but one player in the competition – plenty of which came in the nut-and-bolt dismantling of Italy’s Giovanni Di Lorenzo in the group stage. “Pure cinema,” Williams’ older brother, Inaki, called that display.

The Athletic flier delivered an even better performance in the 2024 Copa del Rey final, sizing up any Mallorca player unfortunate enough to be stood in his way no fewer than 17 times that night. Williams jinked away from the turquoise shirts to set up Oihan Sancet’s second-half equaliser as Athletic went on to win the club’s first major trophy in 40 years.

7

Kylian Mbappe

Paris Saint-Germain

Kylian Mbappe has the same approach to beating a defender as he does when at the negotiating table; cold and efficient. Blessed with unrivalled acceleration, the French superstar rarely varies his dribbling technique, deliberately slowing his opponent down before bursting away in a blur of straight arms and high knees.

What Mbappe may lack in elan, he more than makes up for in effectiveness. Real Madrid’s latest Galactico finished as Ligue 1’s top scorer in each of his final six seasons in France, routinely finding the net after a sharp shuffle of feet. Such a staggering level of consistency affords Mbappe a justified sense of confidence. As former PSG boss Mauricio Pochettino once reflected: “He knows that when the ball reaches him, he is still going to beat his opponent.”

6

Lionel Messi

Inter Miami

Lionel Messi first emerged as a painfully shy winger at Barcelona in 2004, having more difficulty with his billowing shirt than the La Liga defenders strewn in his wake. Two decades later, the legendary Argentine is more sparing with his surges but remains just as evasive.

When Messi first began kicking a ball around as a kid in Rosario, he evaded his older siblings with such ease he became secretly convinced that they were letting him win. As countless professionals will attest, it isn’t a simple task to get the ball off him. “When I was four or five, I played the same way,” the Inter Miami star recalled. “My connection with the ball has always been the same.” No one in MLS can get it off him either.

5

Mohammed Kudus

West Ham

Football has been a salvation for Mohammed Kudus, taking him to the upper echelons of the Premier League out of a tough neighbourhood on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital – an area he is immensely proud of and still regularly visits. But for West Ham’s affable forward, football remains a game to be enjoyed.

“I’m still just having fun in the playground,” Kudus explained in an interview with The Guardian. At times, it looks as though the sinewy schemer is playing against children, such is the ease with which he bounces off Premier League defenders. While most of his forward forays start from deeper on the pitch, Kudus managed to complete more dribbles than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues during the 2023/24 campaign.

4

Rodrygo

Real Madrid

Rodrygo underscored his immense dribbling ability 94 seconds into his Real Madrid career. Taming Casemiro’s raking crossfield pass with the outside of his right boot, the fearless Brazilian dove infield, spun Jose Arnaiz around and picked out the bottom corner.

After a dream debut, Rodrygo shrugged: “I don’t really have the words for this. I’m lucky.” Based on how frequently he has put opposition defenders in a spin cycle before finding the back of the net, good fortune had little to do with it. For a player whose 10th birthday party was themed ‘Rodrygo Real Madrid’, the fleet-footed forward’s career in the Spanish capital has been a long time in the making. After racking up more than 50 goals, three league titles and two Champions Leagues, it’s gone pretty well so far.

3

Jeremy Doku

Manchester City

Jeremy Doku skitters forward like a drop of water on a hot pan. He is a bewildering combination of chops and jinks and feints that leaves defenders dizzy. Playing for a team which bosses possession as emphatically as Manchester City, the Belgian winger has more opportunities than anyone else to take on his opponent.

The figures behind Doku’s dribbling are staggering. Despite playing less than half of the available minutes in the 2023/24 Premier League season, City’s number 11 carried the ball into the 18-yard box on 147 separate occasions – more often than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues. Only one other individual on the continent hit triple digits and no one could come close to his average of eight penalty entries per game.

2

Vinicius Junior

Real Madrid

Yan Couto may still be suffering from PTSD after coming up against Vinicius Junior in February. The highly rated Brazilian right-back was turned inside out and back to front by his grinning compatriot when Girona, La Liga’s surprise leaders, travelled to the Santiago Bernabeu. Couto was dribbled past six times – the most of any opposition defender on record in Spain’s capital – and reduced to tears by the end of a 4-0 hammering.

Tellingly, Vinicius was the first player to comfort the defender he had spent all night tormenting. While it was a new nadir for Couto, that display was just another game for Real Madrid’s number seven, whose brilliance has become normalised.

1

Jamal Musiala

Bayern Munich

Everything about Jamal Musiala’s game is smooth. The slippery eel of a footballer glides across the pitch as though he has the benefit of a three-second delay while everyone else is crashing around in real time. Building up a collage of his surroundings with a constant stream of glances over either shoulder, Musiala’s mazy runs forward often begin when he receives the ball facing his own goal, leaving the first of many opponents in his wake with one spin.

The Bayern Munich prodigy insists: “I don’t do a lot of skills, it’s more like dribbling.” The distinguishing factor is that the feats of trickery which he routinely pulls off involve no unnecessary risk. Seamlessly knocking the ball between his two insteps to wriggle between a crowd has “no risk in it​​​​​​​”, according to Musiala. “It’s not flashy or anything, and it’s an easy skill to go by the defender.” Few players in the world make it look so simple.

​​​​​​​Stats via FBref and Opta. Correct as of 18th August 2024.