In May 2011, journalists from the French newspaper Le Figaro went to the Paris suburb of Bondy and filmed a group of boys playing soccer on a worn, dusty pitch. In the video, one of the youths, wearing an oversized AC Milan jersey bearing the name of the Brazilian star Robinho, moves and dribbles with ease and flow. Pulled aside by the interviewers, he speaks with a light confidence and humor, offering a sharp critique of the powerful French Football Federation (FFF). Though his name was not reported in the video, he is clearly recognizable as a young Kylian Mbappé.
Earlier that month, Mediapart, a French news site, had obtained access to a series of recordings of meetings between FFF leadership from the year prior. In the wake of a disastrous showing at the World Cup that summer, the officials had discussed how to limit national training academies’ recruitment of players with immigrant backgrounds. They were disturbed by the fact that some of the French players training at these academies had ultimately opted to play not for France but for the countries of their immigrant parents.
During the meetings, Laurent Blanc, the coach of the men’s national team, complained about players who “wear the jersey of the national team” and later “go play for North African or African teams,” adding that this was something the FFF had “to limit.” He lamented what he saw as the overrepresentation of Black players who were “big, strong, powerful” but lacked technical skills, and drew a contrast with the Spanish team that had won the 2010 World Cup. “The Spanish have told me: We don’t have a problem. We don’t have any blacks.” The FFF’s director of technical education, François Blaquart, suggested that the federation should quietly encourage recruiters to bring in fewer players of immigrant background. “We can mark it out without saying it,” he remarked, as “a kind of quota.”
In the video interview with Le Figaro, Mbappé, who was only twelve years old, had already heard about this controversy and clearly found it all a bit ridiculous. “When you look back at history,” he reminded his interviewer, “other than Cantona and Platini, all the best players have been Black and Arab.” After all, Zidane, whose parents were Algerian, had in 1998 led France to its only World Cup triumph alongside the defender Lilian Thuram, who was born in Guadeloupe, and Marcel Desailly, the Ghanaian-born center-back, among others. Would the FFF really cut itself off from the sources of its footballing success over the years? He could not have known—though perhaps, in a way, he already did—that he would one day add his own name to that genealogy of great French players.
Mbappé was born in December 1998, months after France’s World Cup victory. His father, Wilfrid, is a football coach who migrated to France from Cameroon; Mbappé’s mother, Fayza Lamari, is a French Algerian former handball athlete. At the time, they lived in the town of Bondy, in a sprawling area north of Paris near the country’s national stadium and many large housing projects.
Football is a center of community life in these neighborhoods, and government support for coaching and infrastructure has helped make the suburbs of Paris and other French cities one of the most consistent fountains of football talent in the world. Mohammed Belkacemi, who focused on cultivating and recruiting talent from these same neighborhoods for the FFF, was the person who recorded the internal meetings in 2010 and later leaked them to Mediapart. It was a transformative act: Blanc and Blaquart both lost their jobs, and in 2012 Didier Deschamps, who captained the World Cup champions in 1998, became the new manager of the men’s national team. He approached the job with a very different attitude, building a roster with mostly players of immigrant backgrounds—including, in time, Kylian Mbappé.
Mbappé has stood out as a player since he was six years old. Antonio Riccardi, his coach at AS Bondy, recalled years later how Mbappé was already faster and more technical than the other children at that age. He was already training at Clairefontaine, France’s national academy, by the age of twelve and later played on the U-17 and U-19 national teams.
From then on, his career was a vertiginous ascent. As a young teenager, Mbappé caught the eye of Zidane, who sought to help recruit him to the academy at Real Madrid. Instead, at the age of fourteen, he joined AS Monaco and left the Paris suburbs for the Mediterranean coast. After a few scintillating years, he was recruited to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017. Flush with cash from its majority owners, Qatar Sports Investments, the club paid Monaco a stunning €180 million transfer fee, the highest ever for a player at the time and only surpassed by the amount that PSG paid for Neymar later that year.
In 2018, Deschamps included Mbappé, then just nineteen, on the roster for the World Cup in Russia. Though he was already known to many by then, his performances on the pitch that year made him a global icon. Alongside Paul Pogba, the team captain, he led the French side to victory after victory, scoring a beautiful and crucial goal in the final against Croatia. He continued to charm when, during a pitch invasion by the anti-Putin activist group Pussy Riot, he high-fived one of the protestors with a smile.
Mbappé brought the same stunning energy to the 2022 World Cup. He led France to the final, then treated the world to perhaps the most operatic and beautiful match in history, scoring a series of comeback goals against Argentina. Watching him in that tournament, Clint Smith called him “akin to a dragonfly, leaving defenders running forward, backwards, and often spinning around in confusion.” It was exhilarating watching him, and I found myself laughing with disbelief at some of his moves. Watching Mbappé against England during that World Cup, I felt so much delight that I penned a song at halftime called “Merci Kylian.”
Importantly, Mbappé and his generation of players inhabit their multiple identities with presence and ease. Unlike other modern footballers—and in the tradition of French predecessors including Thuram and Thierry Henry—they have openly weighed in on political matters, speaking out against the country’s far right at press conferences at the 2024 Euros, their last major international tournament. As Siddhartha Mitter noted in 2018: “They represent the Republic, and its changes. Young, triumphant, influential, beloved, they are drivers of the culture and they know it.” It would seem absurd today to suggest that Kylian Mbappé isn’t truly French, or that he doesn’t belong on the national team. Now, at twenty-seven years old, with his name already etched in French footballing history, he can continue writing it.