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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Serie: Luca Caioli
- Sprache: Englisch
The youngest player to score in the World Cup final since Pelé, for the tournament-winning team, in his brief career to date Kylian Mbappé is breaking records at a rate matched by only the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and is fast becoming one of the biggest names in football. But did you know that even at three years old, he would sit listening to the manager's talk before an AS Bondy match? Or where his signature crossed-arm goal celebration came from and where he first performed it? Or how he got his dressing room nickname 'Thirty-seven'? Find out about all this and more in Luca Caioli and Cyril Collot's tirelessly researched biography of the game's latest superstar, featuring exclusive interviews with those who know him best. Includes the 2018/19 season.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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MBAPPÉ
Updated Edition
LUCA CAIOLI & CYRIL COLLOT
About the authors
Luca Caioli is the bestselling author of Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar. A renowned Italian sports journalist, he lives in Spain.
Cyril Collot is a French sports journalist. He is the author of several books and documentaries about French football, and the bestselling biographies Griezmann, Pogba and Martial.
Contents
Chapter 1
Allée des Lilas
He was told about the visit beforehand and has prepared diligently. He’s written down some thoughts in blue pen. He can’t wait to read them out, but his grandmother tells him to wait, he’ll be able to do it later. Now is not the time: his grandparents and their guests are chatting and drinking coffee. He looks back at the notebook he has put on the table of the small living room dominated by a large television, listening and sometimes intervening in the conversation. He is finally given permission, which comes with a recommendation: read loudly and pronounce the words clearly.
‘Hello everyone, Kylian is the best. He is the hero of Bondy. Everyone loves him. He’s a role model for all children who play football. He is very good. Wilfrid and Fayza have raised their children well. Ethan will follow in the footsteps of his brother, Kylian.’
Idrisse is nine years old; he goes to school, plays football in the Under 10s and, with a handful of words, summarises what everyone in Bondy thinks, from Madame la Maire to the kids who train on the pitches of the Stade Léo-Lagrange just a few hundred metres away.
Idrisse is the grandson of Elmire and Pierrot Ricles, a couple who came to France from Martinique in the late 1970s. They live on the first floor of a white building at number 4, Allée des Lilas. A five-storey 1950s council building in a quiet tree-lined street in the centre of Bondy, an area that some pompously call the Cité de Fleurs thanks to the names of its streets. It was here that – in the autumn of 1998 – the Mbappé family came to live. As you climb the first flight of stairs, there is a post box that still says Lamari-Mbappé Lottin 2nd Left.
‘They moved in on the floor right above us,’ says Elmire, ‘into an apartment identical to ours: 56 square metres, living room, a kitchenette with a view of the Stade Léo-Lagrange, and two bedrooms. I remember that when they arrived Fayza was in the last months of her pregnancy with Kylian.’
Fayza – 24 years old at the time and originally from Algeria – grew up in Bondy Nord, in the Terre Saint Blaise neighbourhood. She attended the Collège Jean Zay and went to the gym right across from the house. She played basketball when she was twelve and thirteen, before focusing on handball. She played on the right wing for AS Bondy in Division 1.
‘She started at the bottom and became one of Bondy’s best handball players in the late 1990s. Fayza had charisma. She was one of the leaders of the team, super talented and super tough,’ remembers a family friend.
‘She was a fighter on the court but she was also hot-headed. It didn’t take much to wind her up and she wasn’t always friendly to the opposition. If you crossed Fayza, you remembered it,’ recalled Jean-Louis Kimmoun, a former director and president of the club in an interview with Le Parisien. ‘But off the pitch, she was, and still is a very sweet person.’
‘She likes to talk a lot though. She used to play pranks all the time. I worked with her for three or four years as an instructor in the Maurice Petitjean and Blanqui neighbourhoods, on Wednesdays and during the school holidays in the community centres. That was where she met Wilfrid, also an instructor, with his little brother Pierre and Alain Mboma, big brother of Patrick Mboma, African Footballer of the Year in 2000. They both loved sport, liked taking the mickey and had strong characters. They were bound to be attracted to each other,’ explains a friend of the couple.
When he moved into Allée des Lilas with Fayza, Wilfrid was 30; he was born in Douala in Cameroon and had come to France in search of a better life. After living in Bobigny, he moved to Bondy Nord, where he played football for years.
‘He was a good player, a number 10, a midfielder who was fond of keeping the ball,’ according to Jean-François Suner, AS Bondy technical director, known to everyone as Fanfan. ‘He could have had a career. He rose through the ranks at the club then played for two years in the Division d’Honneur for the neighbouring club [Bobigny]. When he stopped, he came back to us. We offered him a position and he devoted himself to our young players as an instructor, then as sporting director. We worked together for almost 30 years, from the 1988–9 season, and we restructured the club. He left in June 2017.’
20 December 1998
It had been five months and a handful of days since that famous ‘One, two, three nil!’ Since the two headed blows inflicted by Zinedine Zidane and the coup de grâce from Emmanuel Petit in the final of the World Cup, knocking out the Brazil of Ronaldo, the ailing phenomenon. The memory of that Sunday 12 July and the collective delirium was still fresh. How could you forget one and a half million people celebrating, intoxicated with joy, on the Champs Élysées, singing victory songs?
‘Black-blanc-beur’ (Black-White-North African), with the crowd chanting ‘Zizou for President!’ How could you forget one of the greatest achievements in the history of French sport? It was fitting that in that year blessed by football Fayza and Wilfrid should have received the best Christmas present of all: their first child. He was born on 20 December and was christened with the name Kylian Sanmi (short for Adesanmi, meaning ‘the crown fits me’ in Yoruba) Mbappé Lottin. Mbappé, a surname that would give rise to a thousand assumptions: was Kylian the grandson of Samuel Mbappé Léppé, nicknamed ‘Le Maréchal’, the Cameroonian midfielder of the 1950s and 60s? Or a relative of Étienne M’Bappé the bassist from Douala? No, there was no connection, as Pierre Mbappé would explain: in Cameroon, the surname Mbappé is as common as Dupont in France or Martin in the UK.
Pierre is Kylian’s uncle, a footballer who trained with Stade de l’Est before joining clubs such as Levallois, Villemomble and Ivry.
He dashed to the hospital to meet his nephew, taking the newborn a mini football as a gift. Joking with Fayza and his brother Wilfrid, he said: ‘You’ll see, he’ll be a great footballer one day!’
A few days after the happy event, mother and son came home. Fayza returned to work at the Mairie de Bobigny while Wilfrid only needed to cross the road to get to the football pitches at the Stade Léo-Lagrange to train his kids. There was one in particular that attracted his attention: he was eleven years old and had come to Bondy five years earlier from Kinshasa, then in Zaire, now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The situation was difficult in his country so his parents had decided to send him to France to give him the chance to study and build himself a future. The boy was called Jirès Kembo-Ekoko; he was the son of Jean Kembo, known as ‘Monsieur But’ (Mr Goal), a midfielder for the Zaire team that twice won the Africa Cup of Nations (1968 and 1974), who also scored two goals against Morocco in 1973, helping his team become the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to qualify for the World Cup (Germany 1974). Jean called his son Jirès in honour of Alain Giresse, the French midfielder he admired so much, and sent him to France to live with an uncle and his older sister. In 1999, Jirès Kembo-Ekoko received his first player registration at AS Bondy. Wilfrid was his first coach and soon also became his legal guardian and father.
‘It’s hard to explain but it was instinct, as if that person had always been my destiny,’ Jirès would say years later. The Lamari-Mbappé Lottin family took him into their home; they did not adopt him but he would always call them Mum and Dad because they were the ones who gave him affection, helped him overcome a difficult social situation and realise his dream of becoming a professional footballer. Jirès went to live in Allée des Lilas and became little Kylian’s big brother, role model, idol and first footballing hero. The neighbours remember when he would come home for the weekend from the INF Clairefontaine Academy, or when Fayza and Wilfrid would take him to important matches.
‘They were a very close family, nice down-to-earth people,’ says Pierrot.
‘We didn’t see Wilfrid much because of his work but we would bump into Fayza a lot on the stairs or in the local shops. We saw Kylian grow up. As soon as he started walking, he started kicking a ball around in the room upstairs from my two girls. On Sunday mornings, I think he turned his room into a football pitch!’ Elmire remembers with a laugh.
‘Whenever I saw her, Fayza never stopped apologising. I told her it was fine and that you can hardly tie a child up! Even then, you could see his head was full of football.’
Another laugh and the grandmother talks about the time when they gave the little boy upstairs a djembe drum one Christmas or birthday. ‘He never stopped, it took him a while to forget his new toy. But apart from the football and the drum, Kylian was a lovely, very polite boy who would always say ‘Bonjour’ or ‘Bonsoir’ whenever he saw me. We didn’t get to watch him evolve as a footballer because a few years after the birth of Ethan, the baby of the family who, if my memory serves me correctly, came into the world in 2006, they moved to a residential neighbourhood in the south of the town, on the other side of the station, towards Les Coquetiers. We saw him in May last year when he came back to the stadium here to celebrate winning the French title. All the kids from AS Bondy were there, with a banner that said: “Thank you Kylian, everyone in Bondy is behind you!” It was really nice. Kylian gave the kids shirts and Idrisse even managed to get a picture with him.’
‘Luckily Fayza saw us and shouted: “Wait, wait, that’s my neighbour!” so I got into the van and took the photo that my Mum looks after now,’ the grandson explains.
‘We wrote a letter for the occasion, with the three other families that live here, with Daniel and Claudine Desramé, our neighbours on the first floor.’
Elmire gets up from the table, walks over to a corner of the room, opens a drawer and flicks through a mountain of paper. Eventually she exclaims: ‘Here it is!’
Dear Kylian,
We hope you won’t be shocked if we address you informally. We still remember you as the very well-brought up ten-year-old boy we would meet on the stairs of number 4, Allée des Lilas. Now, you’re a big football star and you shine on the pitch. We’re following the dazzling success of your sporting career with joy. We often talk about you and your parents we were so fond of. They gave you a very good education. Every time you lace up your boots, don’t forget that your neighbours are your biggest fans!
With warm wishes for the future.
Chapter 2
The town where anything is possible
You can’t miss it. It’s right in front of you as you go over the A3 towards Paris. It’s huge. It occupies four floors of the side of the eight-storey Résidence des Potagers. It’s an explosion of green, of leaves, of footballs spurting out everywhere. In the middle, looking serious and giving a ‘shaka’ sign, stands Kylian Mbappé, wearing a Paris Saint-Germain shirt. There’s a slogan at the top: ‘Bondy: the town where anything is possible.’ It’s a mega fresco that looks down from on high over a motorway that spews cars and traffic jams; it keeps an eye on Avenue du Général Galliéni (formerly the RN3), on the comings and goings of new businesses (from Conforama to Darty), and accompanies the kids that cross the street to go into the Lycée Madeleine-Vionnet and the groups of teenagers approaching the Collège Jean-Renoir. It is an honour, the kind of mural usually reserved for people like Zinedine Zidane, who, after the World Cup win in 1998, was entitled to a giant portrait on Marseille’s Place Paul Ricard, looking out towards the Mediterranean. Like Diego Armando Maradona, immortalised by Jorit Agoch on a building in San Giovanni a Teduccio (Naples) or the giant poster of Moussa Sissoko on the façade of Le Galion in Aulnay.
The huge panel with the effigy of the PSG number 29 was paid for by Nike, who have been sponsoring the young centre forward since he was thirteen years old. The American sportswear brand has also put its hand into its pockets to build a community sports facility: it was opened on 6 September 2017, in the Jardin Pasteur, where Kylian learned to dribble for the first time and scored his first goals. Two symbols, the fresco and the sports facility, asked for by the Mbappé family as a tribute to the town where Kylian was born.
Bondy, in the Seine-Saint-Denis (93) département and the Île-de-France region, is a suburb to the north-east of Paris, nine kilometres from the city’s Porte de Pantin. It is the ninth largest town in the département, a cosmopolitan municipality of almost 54,000 inhabitants, not counting the Canal de l‘Ourcq area.
The name Bondy appears for the first time between 590 and 630 in the will of Ermenthrude, a rich widow who bequeathed land, an ox-cart, clothing and various objects of worship to the church built at the intersection of the ancient Roman Rue Compoise and the road from Lutetia to Meaux. There are two theories about the origin of the town’s name: that it comes from Bonitius (in Latin, the son of Bonit), the owner of the land during the Gallo-Roman period, or that it is derived from the Gallic word ‘bon’, meaning ‘hillock’. Over time, the name became Boniaticus, Boniasensis, Bonisiacus, Boniaticus (8th century), Bulzeia, Bonzeia (12th century), Bondis, and finally Bondy (17th century). It was during the 17th and 18th centuries that the name Bondy first became linked to the forest, the Bois de Bondy, well known at that time as a refuge for bandits. It was at the local post office where, in the night between 20 and 21 June 1791, Pierre-Augustin Fremin, a postmaster and future mayor, recognised Louis XVI fleeing from the Tuileries Palace disguised as a valet de chambre. His escape was short lived: the king of France was later arrested in Varennes. Today, all that is left of the famous forest is a few hectares to the extreme north of the département, but the town’s coat of arms and its motto, ‘Happy under its shade’, still recall it.
In the late 18th century, Bondy had 300–400 inhabitants, who worked the land. It was from 1821 – with the end of the construction of the Canal de l’Ourcq by Napoleon to bring water to the capital – that the town experienced a period of great industrial and urban expansion, with the arrival of the territory’s first mills and cement factories. Some claim these ended up here not only because of the land and water but because of the prevailing north-easterly winds taking smoke and fumes towards the provinces and far from the delicate nostrils of the capital’s bourgeoisie. Between 1860 and 1870, with the arrival of the railway linking Paris to Strasbourg, many natives of Alsace and Lorraine who worked on the construction of the line moved into the area around the station. In the early 20th century, residential neighbourhoods developed to the south of the town: stone houses and a manor, typical of the Paris region. To the north, peasants still cultivated vegetables but everything changed with the advent of the new century. The automobile industry was booming; workers went to live near the factories and Bondy, like other parts of the Seine-Saint-Denis département, became a working-class city.
The class element is a significant one, given that a right-wing mayor has not been elected to the Town Hall since 1919. The town’s mayors (with the exception of Henri Varagnat, a Communist Party mayor from 1935 to 1939, who, like all Communist elected officials, was removed at the outbreak of the Second World War) have always come from the ranks of the Socialist Party. Sylvine Thomassin is no exception. She came to Seine-Saint-Denis as a child, worked as a mid-wife in the maternity unit at the Jean Verdier hospital and then took over policies on education and urban renewal before becoming mayor in October 2011. She replaced Gilbert Roger, who had been elected to the post of senator. She considers the recent past, present and future of the town: ‘From the 1950s and 60s, with the arrival of returnees from Algeria, immigrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Portugal, new neighbourhoods and large housing complexes were built in the north of the town to deal with the housing crisis and the dismantling of the slums. Bondy went from 22,411 inhabitants in 1954 to 51,653 in 1968. It was the first wave of migration,’ explains Thomassin.
‘It would be followed by a second, between 1980 and 1990, generally from countries south of the Sahara: Zaire, Cameroon, Congo and Angola. The housing estates allowed thousands of families to have access to hygienic conditions, drinking water and electricity. In short, to modern comforts. The right to housing was guaranteed; working-classes and middle-classes lived together happily. There was a strong and active community fabric in the neighbourhoods: it was the golden age. The estates worked well until the brutal rise in unemployment between 1970 and 1980. Then, little by little, those who went to live there did so through lack of any other option. The estates were designed to last for 30 years, but it’s been twice as long now and enough is enough. We don’t want any more to be built. It’s a situation we’re trying to change with the urban renewal project (PRU) launched in 2006 and now in its second phase.’
Bondy is a town under construction, or rather under reconstruction. To understand what this means, you only need to stroll down Rue Jules Guesde to Place du 11 Novembre 1918. Right in front of the Town Hall – a building that is part Soviet, part functionalist in style – there once stood a huge housing estate that stretched as far as the RN3. The square is now home to pleasant, well-looked after buildings in a range of colours, from white to wood; they do not exceed five stories and boast the windows of new shops and businesses on the ground floor. It is a piece of urban planning that is profoundly changing the fabric of the town, its services, green spaces, infrastructure and housing policy. Not limited to the centre, it runs to five neighbourhoods, including those to the north considered the most problematic.
‘We want to change the face of the city, recreate a place, an open space where people want to live, to live together,’ adds the mayor.
It is not the only ambitious project: urban renewal also involves a new economic model and a profound change in the industrial fabric.
‘Starting with the crisis in the oil industry, we’ve seen a process of de-industrialisation. Many factories have been relocated to other regions or other countries. Now the Seine-Saint-Denis département is gambling on attracting other types of businesses. But it’s not easy, especially because the state has made other choices, favouring Paris and the west of the capital,’ continues the mayor.
‘But we’re not feeling sorry for ourselves, we’ve rolled up our sleeves and started working. Bond’innov, the first business incubator, came into being in 2011. It now plays host to and supports about 40 innovative entrepreneurs who want to develop their projects in the fields of life sciences and biotechnology, in particular digital technologies; the environment; the social and solidarity economies; north–south relations; cooperation and international development focused on Africa.’
Sylvine Thomassin stresses: ‘We’re trying to build a solid and close-knit town capable of integrating into the dynamics of the Grand Paris region.’
That may be true, but what does Bondy, the town where anything is possible, have to do with the image of Kylian Mbappé?
‘“The town where anything is possible” is a slogan launched long before the phenomenal rise of Kylian. It didn’t come from sport but from education and culture, two themes that, little by little, are becoming part of Bondy’s DNA,’ explains the Socialist official.
‘First and foremost, the Maîtrise de Radio France choir school. Founded in 1946, in Paris, it was one of the few institutions that tried to address the issue of what could be done for the banlieues after the riots in 2005. Eleven years ago, it decided to open a second headquarters here, with the aim of giving kids from the north the opportunity to discover music, learn about it and play it to a high level. That same year, 2005, also saw the birth of the Bondy Blog, which tells the story of diversity in France, and, since 2009, we have had a satellite of the École Supérieure de Journalisme de Lille that allows kids who can’t count on their parents’ wallets when it comes to enrolling in important universities to learn the craft of journalism. We founded the “cafés philos” and the Université Populaire Averroès, in which 1,900 people have registered. Who would ever have thought that in a working-class town like Bondy there were so many people interested in courses about mathematical problems, art history, music through the centuries and astronomy? That some 1,900 people attend the university, not to graduate, but for the pleasure of learning, is really wonderful.
‘And there’s another factor that makes us very proud, our success rate at baccalauréat level: 87 per cent in a town that, in terms of socio-professional categories for national education, would not be expected to exceed 73 per cent. Not only that but ten to fifteen years ago, when kids from Bondy passed the bac, the most they would choose would be a BTS [technical higher education diploma]. They would self-censor, believing they wouldn’t be able to continue their studies, but today, thanks to teacher volunteering and priority education agreements with institutes such as Sciences Po and the University Pierre and Marie Curie, they know that success is possible for them too, that you can do it in the banlieue just like you can do it anywhere else, just like in the top Parisian high schools.’
And Kylian Mbappé is living proof of this success? ‘Kylian is the pride of the town. We’re hugely proud that we’ve given the metropolis of Grand Paris and the whole of France such a wonderfully talented young man who has even instilled a passion for football in people like me who prefer rugby! He’s a boy who hasn’t forgotten Bondy. He is an ambassador for the region and living proof that this really is the town where anything is possible.’
‘He’s leading the charge,’ adds Oswald Binazon, equipment manager at the stadium. ‘But we’ve got so many athletes who’ve reached the top in handball, rugby, fencing, judo and football. We also have teams like AS Bondy in men’s basketball, who won the French title in National 1 in 1998, while the women’s handball team reached Division 1. Bondy is a sport‑mad town, thanks in part to a political will to get children playing sport. The former mayor, Claude Furzier, founded the Bondy Sporting Association in 1978, which now includes 26 disciplines and has 3,700 members. AS Bondy goes into schools to get young people involved in sport. There are handball and basketball courts in the playgrounds. We have a tennis complex, two swimming pools, five gyms and five community multi-sport facilities in the town, including the one opened by Nike in the Jardin Pasteur. Where’s the heart of sport in Bondy? Here, at the Léo-Lagrange sports complex.’
Chapter 3
Oulala, Oulala
By six in the evening all the pancakes have disappeared. Like every Wednesday, training day, and every Saturday, match day, Karima makes more than a hundred. There’s no trace of them now. The little footballers, hungry and greedy, have to return to the pitches of the Stade Léo-Lagrange disconsolate, without a steaming plate and a Nutella moustache. The most they can buy is a drink or a few sweets. But it’s not the same. Next to the snack bar, Athmane Airouche smiles as he sips a nice coffee made by Karima. There’s no shortage of that. He greets the boys who come to say hello and shake his hand before going into the dressing room. He then goes to check on the work of the Under 11 instructor.
Since June 2017, Airouche has been the president of AS Bondy, after being both a player and instructor in the Under 19 category, a ‘rebellious age’, he confesses. With his back to the scribbled green graffiti of the club’s name and the word ‘football’, he reels off some facts and figures: ‘We have 800 members, ranging from Under 7s to seniors. There are 140 girls, almost double compared to last season. Is it the Kylian effect?
Yes, it seems that way, and unfortunately we’ve had to turn down so many boys. We don’t have the facilities or the capacity to take them. There are two football pitches here, one artificial, one grass, an indoor futsal hall and the Stade Robert-Gazzi on the other side of Bondy. We’re a training club, we know how to work with kids and young people and that’s our mission. We’ve never thought about taking on anything else. Although it should be pointed out that we’ve trained more than 30 boys who’ve gone on to turn professional. Last season, four of our students ended up at PSG, Bordeaux and Monaco.
Ours is a family club that plays a social role. We don’t pick children based on their technique or skills, we take them because we want them to do some sport, play and have fun. We see no difference between those who come from Bondy North or Bondy South, from a middle-class or working-class family. From the moment they come through the stadium gates they’re all budding footballers as far as we’re concerned. We also keep an eye on their schooling and meet their teachers and families. We try to pass on values such as education, respect for others and rules, work that is serious and done well. And we insist on the importance of study; not everyone can become a big football star. It’s a shame that sometimes the parents put the pressure on. They’re obsessed with the idea of having a son who’s a footballer. Just the other day I had a long discussion with a father. In the end I asked him: “But wouldn’t you be happy if your son became a good lawyer?”’
What about Kylian Mbappé?
‘We often talk about him because a player with his qualities comes through perhaps only every 30 to 40 years in the life of a club like ours. We use him as an example to the kids for the attitude he has on and off the pitch. Everyone here is proud of Kylian. Why? Because he was born in this club and stayed here for nine years.’
Karima interrupts the president. Someone is looking for him. He leaves for a few minutes then comes back, ready to chat again.
‘He lived over there,’ says Airouche, gesturing with a wave of his hand beyond the stadium walls to the white buildings of Allée des Lilas. ‘This was his kindergarten,’ adds the president. ‘He was here every day, always with his father, who was the technical director for the categories from U11 to U17. Kylian must have been three or four years old. He was the club’s little mascot. You would see him come into the dressing room holding a ball and sit in the corner, in silence, to hear what the manager had to say before the game. I don’t think there can be any other kids in the world who’ve listened to so many conversations. There can’t be many who’ve heard so many technical discussions, tactics, sermons and lectures. And because Kylian has always been a sponge, someone who learns very quickly, from an early age he assimilated football concepts that others only heard and understood years later.’
