It is a tale of Sellotape and paper, of foam and leather and plastic. It was football, but not as Ibrahima Konate knows it now, not least because the objects he kicked may not even qualify as footballs. He has been on a long journey to take him a short way, from the 11th arrondissement of Paris to the Stade de France. It is about 10km but he has taken the long route, via Sochaux, Leipzig and Liverpool.
When the boy from the banlieues of the French capital lines up in the Champions League final, it will differ from the games he used to play in his home city. “Now I’ll be on the grass,” the defender said. They didn’t have grass in the cages where he started out. The ground that hosted the 1998 World Cup final, a year before his birth, was in the same city, but a different universe.
