Melchie Dumornay: Rising Star of Women's Football

Four years ago, Amandine Miquel looked at a teenage Melchie Dumornay lighting up Reims and calmly said she was “at 30 per cent of her level.”

It sounded outrageous. It also sounded right.

Because even then, the talent was obvious. Dumornay was already playing at a height that made the idea of another 70 per cent almost absurd. How much better could she possibly get?

Season by season, the answer has arrived.

The brave choice: Reims, not royalty

When Dumornay left Haiti for Reims, her first move abroad, the expectation back home was simple and blunt. The questions followed her everywhere.

“Where are you going at 18? Paris Saint-Germain or Lyon?”

Reims was not the answer people wanted to hear. It was not the glamour move. It was not the superclub.

Dumornay knew it. “I know that it might disappoint some people in some way that I'm moving to Reims,” she admitted. “But people who know football will understand my decision. For the other people, it's okay. I will prove them wrong in the future.”

Reims gave her something PSG or Lyon could not guarantee at that age: minutes, mistakes, and the space to grow. In the Champagne city, she became a central figure, not a promising name on a stacked bench.

“She knew she would be in a good championship, but she would still be an important player and not just a substitute,” Miquel explained.

Two years later, the numbers told the story. Thirty-nine appearances. Twenty-three goals. A teenager who hadn’t just adapted to French football, but bent it to her rhythm.

At that point, the move everyone had predicted finally came. Lyon called again, this time with a contract, and the player who had once trialled with the eight-time European champions before she was old enough to sign now had the chance to lead their next era.

Carrying a nation, then joining a giant

Any lingering doubts about whether Dumornay could handle the Lyon pressure were erased in a single, seismic night in 2023.

In the Women’s World Cup play-off, Haiti faced Chile with a place at the tournament on the line. Dumornay scored both goals in a 2-1 win, dragging her country to a first-ever World Cup. A teenager carrying a nation, not just a team.

Australia brought no fairy-tale results, but it did bring respect. Drawn with England, China and Denmark, Haiti lost all three group games yet never folded. Dumornay, still only 19, shone in every match.

Against England, the European champions, she was so influential that BBC Sport readers named her Player of the Match despite Haiti’s 1-0 defeat. On the biggest stage, against the biggest names, she didn’t shrink. She grew.

That was the player Lyon were getting.

A setback, then a surge

Her first months at OL did not go to script. An ankle injury forced her out for more than three months and slowed the momentum that had carried her from Reims to Lyon and from Port-au-Prince to the World Cup.

When she returned, she wasted no time making up for it.

In the closing stretch of the 2023-24 season, Dumornay produced five goals and five assists in 11 games. Crucially, she ripped through PSG in the Champions League semi-final, delivering two goals and two assists across the tie as Lyon won 5-3 on aggregate.

That is not a supporting role. That is a star deciding a season.

The final against Barcelona in Bilbao told a different story. Dumornay led the line but could only muster one shot as Lyon fell short against a more assured Barca display. For once, she and her team could not bend the occasion to their will.

Even so, the verdict on her first year in Lyon remained emphatic. At 20, she had walked into one of the most demanding dressing rooms in world football, recovered from a serious injury, become a key player and lifted two trophies.

“I always believed that if I'm in Lyon, I would progress every day,” she told GOAL before the 2024-25 campaign. “That's what's happening.”

She was right.

From finisher to fulcrum

The next step came with a positional tweak and a new voice on the touchline.

Jonatan Giraldez, fresh from his success at Barcelona, arrived at Lyon at the start of this season and immediately shifted Dumornay’s role. No longer primarily stationed high up as a pseudo-No.9, she dropped back into midfield, alternating between a No.10 and a slightly deeper playmaker.

It was the role she had always wanted. “Because I want to be everywhere,” she has said of her preference for midfield.

Now she is.

The change has transformed both her influence and Lyon’s flow. Her touches per game have climbed in both the league and the Champions League. With that, the number of key passes has risen too. The ball finds her more often; Lyon find more solutions.

“We know that Melchie is one of the best players in the world,” Giraldez said earlier this season. “We have to find her as many times as possible.”

It sounds obvious, but it has become a simple, ruthless equation: the more Dumornay has the ball, the more dangerous Lyon become.

This is not a slight on the rest of OL’s galaxy of stars. It is a recognition of form. Right now, Dumornay is playing at a level that edges into Ballon d’Or territory. When a player reaches that bracket, you build around them.

A No.9 only gets the chance to do very specific things,” Giraldez noted this week. “I think she's very capable of doing different things.”

He has unlocked those “different things” and, in doing so, unleashed a fuller version of her game.

‘She has it all, really’

The players who have tried to stop her know what that means in practice.

Ingrid Engen, now a team-mate at Lyon but once an opponent with Barcelona in the 2024 UWCL final, summed up the experience of marking Dumornay.

“She's definitely a threat and someone I really had to try to manage as well as possible in that game,” the defender admitted. “She's very difficult to manage because she has this strength, she has the power, she has the technique – she has it all, really.”

Strength. Power. Technique. At 22, Dumornay already combines the physical force to ride challenges with the close control to slip out of tight spaces and the vision to punish any defence that loses concentration for a second.

The raw teenager at Reims has become a complete midfielder at Lyon. Yet the people closest to her are adamant that she is still nowhere near her ceiling.

Miquel’s 30 per cent remark no longer sounds wild. It sounds prophetic.

Only the beginning

Under Giraldez, Dumornay has climbed another level, but even he refuses to pretend this is the finished article.

“This is not the top,” he said before Saturday’s final in Oslo, where Lyon again chase European glory with Dumornay expected to be central to their plans.

That line hangs in the air.

Because if this is not the top – if the player dominating midfields, deciding semi-finals and dictating the tempo for one of the game’s great clubs is still short of her peak – then what does 100 per cent look like?

Haiti saw the first glimpse. Reims gave her the platform. Lyon are witnessing the evolution.

The scariest part for the rest of Europe is simple: this really is only the start.