Headstrong French star Kylian Mbappé wants to be more than a well-paid top football player

Ask young people in the Parisian suburb of Bondy what star footballer Kylian Mbappé means to them, and nine times out of ten you will get an answer that is not really about football. They start with the sports complex that was refurbished in 2017 by Mbappé’s sponsor Nike. About the concert of rapper Niska that took place in the town thanks to Mbappé. About the huge mural that adorns an apartment building. Or about the empty streets when all of Bondy turned out to welcome the attacker home after the World Cup in Russia in 2018. “He lit up Bondy,” says student Soraya Amara (17) beaming.

The city can use it. Bondy (over 50,000 inhabitants) is one of the forty towns in Seine-Saint-Denis, which has perhaps the worst image of all the French departments. The unemployment is high in the city – 30 percent of the Bondynois sit at home – the average income is low. It’s such banlieue which is usually spoken about in a negative sense, says Mayor Stephen Hervé by telephone. “The focus is often on crime.”

It can be seen in the streetscape, where gray blocks of flats alternate with low-rise workers’ houses. The edges of the city are decorated with colorful graffiti. Pizzerias, kebab shops, hookah cafes and vape shops follow each other in the center. A continuous stream of cars drives through the streets.

It is the setting in which Kylian Mbappé (1998) grew up. For a large part of his childhood he lived with his parents, adopted brother Jirès and little brother Ethan in an apartment of less than sixty square meters. They looked out on the fields of AS Bondy, the local football club with a discolored grandstand with less than three hundred seats where Mbappé’s Cameroonian father Wilfried was a trainer. Mother Fayza Lamari, born in France to Algerian parents, played handball at a professional level.

Also read this profile from 2019: Kylian Mbappé, star of the banlieue, hope of Les Bleus

Unguided projectile

Mbappé was a loose cannon as a child, Lamari said Le Parisien. ‘KyKy’ bounced around the house from early morning, often with a ball at his foot. Despite his above-average IQ, he had difficulty concentrating at school and was up to mischief. “It’s not malice, but it drives you crazy,” Lamari said.

It was because his mind was always on football, Mbappé describes in his released last year autobiographical comic book Je m’appelle Kylian. From an early age he played football with his brothers, who would also become professional football players. He memorized the names of great players and their clubs. Pasted his childhood room full of posters of Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar jr, currently his teammate. And he dreamed big: in his comic book he describes how he said as a child that he would one day play in the Champions League, be part of the national team, score at a World Cup. His family called him petite mythlittle fantasy.

But it was more than a childhood fantasy or arrogance. It was also self-knowledge. From his first football game with AS Bondy at the age of four, it was clear how talented he was. Mbappé was lightning fast, scored often and with both feet. Throughout his childhood he played two years above his age. His talent was noticed by the big clubs: when Mbappé was twelve, scouts from Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Real Madrid and AS Monaco were already lining the line.

But his parents wanted Mbappé to finish school and they thought he was too young to go abroad. So he stayed with AS Bondy under the wing of his father, until he was admitted to the national football academy INF Clairefontaine in 2011. After this, offers from several top clubs were on the table, but the Mbappés opted for the smaller AS Monaco. Not too far from home and Mbappé could play more. He received 400,000 euros signing money.

Headstrong

Mbappé played two years as a junior in Monaco before starting as a professional footballer in 2015 at the age of sixteen, with a monthly salary of 80,000 euros. In Monaco, the Mbappés showed that they would not just comply with the (unwritten) rules of the football world. When Mbappé did not get on well with the youth coach, he and his mother forced him to train alone. When big names in the football world tried to persuade Mbappé senior to hire a player’s agent, he brushed them off – he could do it himself. And when the legal work became too much for Lamari, she hired a Parisian lawyer who knew nothing about football and was therefore “not polluted by the football universe.”

Mbappé would more often go his own way. When Real Madrid made a bid to acquire him in 2017 for a record sum of 180 million euros, he said no. “I am a Parisian,” he allegedly told AS Monaco president Vadim Vasilyev. “I don’t just want to leave my country, I want to become a big player in France.” Also his parents wanted him to continue his career in his own country, so that he could also continue to receive French education.

Read also: At Paris Saint-Germain, image control is paramount

The arrows were aimed at PSG, in Mbappé’s eyes the only club of value in France. Father Mbappé contacted the Qatari owner Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, who personally visited the family in Monaco. In 2017, Mbappé signed a contract in Paris, PSG was willing to match Real’s astronomical amount of 180 million euros.

The same year he made his debut in the French national team. And a year later, Mbappé caused a furore by scoring four times at the World Cup in Russia as a nineteen-year-old, one of which came in the Les Blues won final. After a somewhat stiff start, Mbappé has also made himself indispensable at PSG, where he plays alongside Neymar Jr. and Lionel Messi. Last season he scored 34 times in 43 games.

The now 23-year-old footballer has fulfilled his childhood dreams. against the French news channel BFM TV he said last summer that he now aims to win the Champions League with PSG – it would be the club’s first time – and become the club’s top scorer. “If I carry on as I am doing now, there is no reason that I will not be,” he said confidently as ever. Winning the World Cup again is also on his list, said national coach Didier Deschamps hopefully at RTL.

But where Mbappé only dreamed about football in his youth, he now also has ambitions outside the stadium. Against The New York Times he said he “wants to be more than that guy who shoots the ball, finishes his career and sits on a yacht and collects his money.” ‘KyKy’ wants to be a good person. Have a positive impact on the world. That is why, after the world title in 2018, he donated the profit premium of 350,000 euros to a sports organization for disabled children. He set up the foundation at the beginning of this year Inspired by KM op, who supports 98 French children from various backgrounds financially and through courses and coaching but their first job. And he aimed media company Zebra Valley on, that should increase ‘global diversity’ and give ‘a voice to young people’.

On social media, he still shows himself to be a family man. Instead of pictures of expensive cars and watches, he shares images on which he sings songs with his niece and nephew or FIFA plays with his little brother, often with his trademark big smile. “He’s really funny,” says Soraya Amara in Bondy. Her friend Lina Hua Oui (17) adds that he comes across as “super nice, friendly”.

‘City of possibilities’

Mbappé also seems to want to be the face of his socially conscious generation. In interviews, which he prefers to give to media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal than to sports magazines, he is eloquent. He emphasizes that he reads books and thinks about social themes such as police brutality and racism. He himself was a victim of it several times, including when he died in 2020 decisive penalty kick missed in the quarterfinals of the European Championship against Switzerland.

In an interview of l’Equipe President Emmanuel Macron said Mbappé has “a rare awareness of his role, the weight of his words, the power of his actions.” The same Macron personally called Mbappé when the attacker was about to transfer to Real Madrid earlier this year. Mbappé finally decided to stay in Paris after this “cry of the fatherland and the capital”. His salary, it seems 72 million euros per year and the fact that the “team was built around him” will have played a role.

At least in Bondy he has influence inside and outside the football field. “Since the success of Mbappé, we see that many more children want to play football,” says mayor Hervé. He does not have exact figures, but “AS Bondy now has to make selections and a few small clubs have been added in the city”.

Student Amara says that Mbappé shows young people that residents of poor municipalities can also make it. “He has from Bondy made the city of possibilities,” she says referring to the slogan “ville des possibles‘ which Nike came up with for the city and which is displayed on a wall along the stadium. Schoolmate Mohamed Aïttaleb, 18, says Mbappé’s success “gives hope to little ones that they can escape the difficult life in neighborhoods like this one, where life isn’t always pretty.”