Mbappé: 2020 Updated Edition

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