There have been points this week when it has seemed that England were not about to face a team in the World Cup quarter-final on Saturday, but a single player. Kylian Mbappé has dominated the plotline like Diego Maradona did in the past and Cristiano Ronaldo wished he could do in the present.
The France forward already has five goals to his credit in this World Cup, to add to the four he scored in Russia four years ago. Nine in total – that’s one more than Maradona and the same as Ballon d’Or winners Eusébio and Paolo Rossi. He could still be on his way to becoming a double world champion before reaching his 24th birthday.
None of France’s opponents in Qatar has found an answer to his speed, technique and strength. Australia, Denmark and Poland have succumbed in turn, only Tunisia being spared in Les Bleus’ march to the quarter-finals – when Didier Deschamps decided his star forward should be preserved and used only as a substitute. On Saturday it is Kyle Walker’s turn to try to snuff out that candle which keeps lighting up every time it seems as though it has been blown out. The France midfielder Youssouf Fofana has wished the England defender luck while his international teammate Dayot Upamecano recommended an early night on Friday in preparation for facing the forward.
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Mbappé will take it all in as he always has and it seems always will, not as an obstacle but as another milestone in his irresistible rise to the very top of world football, now that we’re nearing the end of the Ronaldo-Messi era. And if he gets there (some would say he already has), it won’t be by accident. The grand plan was always to turn him into a superstar footballer.
If, in order to succeed, you first need to be born in the right place at the right time, the stars could not have aligned in a more propitious fashion for the young Mbappé. His local club, AS Bondy, where Mbappé’s father Wilfried used to coach the under-15s, has trained more than a dozen top professionals. Among them are striker Jonathan Ikoné, a French champion with Lille, now with Fiorentina; and most recently Arsenal defender William Saliba, a member of Didier Deschamps’ squad in Qatar.
What’s more, the sporting prowess of this modest banlieue is reflected in the quality of the infrastructure and the coaching to which the local youth has free access. The young Mbappé could hardly have wished for a more favourable environment if he had wanted to become an elite athlete, which is exactly what he desired, from a very young age. Similarly his parents, Cameroon-born Wilfried and Fayza Lamari, of Algerian Kabyle heritage and a former professional handball player with the Bondy’s club, realised that the elder of their two sons possessed a unique gift which deserved to be given every chance to blossom. The Mbappé project was born.
The prodigy had a role model close at hand. Wilfried and Fayza had come to the assistance of Congolese friends and provided shelter to Jirès Kembo Ekoko, a nine-year-old who had been sent from Kinshasa to France to escape a problematic family situation. Jirès, Kylian’s senior by more than a decade, was a promising winger who went straight from Bondy’s under-11s team to the Clairefontaine academy and progressed to France’s junior and Espoirs international team and later played for Rennes in Ligue 1. Kylian’s first treasured shirt was the one that the man he considers his “big brother” gave him after scoring two goals against Estonia in his first match for France Under-23s. As Mbappé would later put it in an animated film he made in 2020, Je m’appelle Kylian, whose first frames show him emerging into the world from the shell of a football-shaped egg, “I was born into football.”
His gift was such that Nike provided him with free shoes from the age of 10 and offered him a proper contract two years later. There again, growing up in Bondy, where Europe’s biggest clubs were known to regularly send their observers, had been a blessing. Whoever shone there was bound to get noticed, and early. As one of the assistants of the famed Sevilla scout Monchi once told me: “By the time Kylian was 12, all of Europe knew about him, and it was too late for a club like ours to make a move.” Sevilla, at the time, had just won the Spanish Cup and the Uefa Cup twice each in five years.
The most remarkable aspect of his ascent is not its smoothness, however. It is how, from the outset, it was framed within a plan devised by parents for whom their child was not an asset to develop and exploit, but a fully aware and responsible participant who was involved in the decision-making process. The precocious child had made up his mind at an extraordinarily young age. “He could sing La Marseillaise when he was six,” says one of his first coaches, Antonio Riccardi. When asked why he’d learned it, the “little frog”, as another of his teachers called him, explained that “one day, I’ll play in the World Cup for France”. So better be prepared.
At the same age, Mbappé would also watch interviews of his heroes – Cristiano Ronaldo and Thierry Henry in particular – and pretend he was giving a press conference, putting the questions to himself. This perhaps laid the foundation for the quite extraordinary verbal fluency and the naturel of his media persona. As if somehow the young adult is still enjoying the “let’s pretend” games of his childhood, which he can play in three languages: his native French, English and Spanish; his mother tongue and the foreign languages he studied at school and perfected taking weekly tuition from 2019 onward. Again, better be prepared when the time comes to respond positively to Liverpool’s or, more to the point, Real Madrid’s insistent calls.
Remarkably, and unlike what so many young gifted footballers have to endure, the plan Wilfried and Fayza had devised for their son involved no coercion, just gentle adjustments if and when needed. The more he could be himself, the better he would become, provided he kept a level head. When did not, Fayza, in particular, did not shy away from telling him off. Such as when he was overheard calling Neymar “a tramp” when he hadn’t passed the ball to him, one of the myriad storms to have stirred and shaken Paris Saint-Germain’s teacup since the Qatari sovereign fund QSI took control of the club. Prospective agents were given short shrift: to this day, the world’s most valuable footballer doesn’t have one.
Even though Kylian’s parents separated in 2021, Team Mbappé remained united. Wilfried still deals with the footballing side of his son’s career. Fayza looks after his image, his community work and his communication strategy, working (since 2015, when Kylian was only 16) with the Paris-based lawyer Delphine Verheyden. Her VVIP client list reads like a Who’s Who of France’s greatest modern Olympians, including decathlete Kevin Mayer, judoka Teddy Riner, pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie – and very few others. Wilfried, Fayza, Verheyden (who is played a flat hourly fee and receives no commission on the deals she brokers for her star customer) are the three bases of the triangle at the heart of which is the 23-year-old Mbappé.
While other football megastars can directly or indirectly employ hundreds of people, Team Mbappé consists of 30 individuals at the most, the majority of whom are peripheral figures who only intervene when their help is needed. Given the size of the Mbappé business this is a low number compared to the bloated entourage which other marquee footballers surround themselves with in 2022.
This may be the secret of the Mbappé project, which contrasts with what was put in place for another outlandishly gifted superstar, his PSG teammate Neymar, whose career has been masterminded from the beginning by his father, Neymar Santos Sr. A long-term strategy was devised in both cases, which included avoiding the trap of signing for a huge club too early, and focused on game time instead.
In 2013, when 14 years old, Mbappé ignored the advances of Chelsea and Real Madrid and went to Monaco instead. Neymar chose to stay at Santos for at least one extra season, enabling his advisers to expand a lucrative local sponsorship portfolio, before joining Barcelona for the kind of fee which guaranteed it would be almost impossible to leave the recruit on the bench. But there the similitudes end. In Mbappé’s case, it was a decision which the player was involved in. In Neymar’s, even if he was happy enough to go along with his father’s decision, that decision was taken for him.
This might explain the reason why a world champion can still exude the impishness of the slightly built youngster who exulted in his dribbling ability in Bondy. Why, when he celebrates his goals by crossing his arms as if posing for a photograph, there’s always the shadow of a smile on his lips (“it’s just for fun, guys”) and none of the increasingly tone-deaf machismo of Cristiano Ronaldo’s spin and pose on similar, now rarer, occasions.
Why one of the first images that come to mind when thinking of Mbappé remains him zooming away from Barcelona’s Gérard Piqué in a famous PSG victory, arms and legs a blur, the hapless defender desperately trying to get hold of the speed merchant’s coattails. Why Mbappé can be invited for dinner by the president, Emmanuel Macron (who advised him to stay at PSG when Real Madrid came calling earlier this year), on the rare occasions when duties allow the head of state to organise private gatherings at the Élysée Palace, and take it in his stride, his credibility untouched.
To him, it’s all a game, a game he set the rules for from the beginning. In this respect too, he is a player apart.
