At the Parc des Princes,
To use a cliché (big clogs) from the football world, it was a press conference to be shown in all communication schools. On the stage of the Parc des Princes auditorium, Monday afternoon, in front of a hundred journalists, Kylian Mbappé lent himself for a good half hour to the game of questions and answers with disconcerting skill. We would almost forget that the boy is only 23 years old and that at his age, our only concerns were to arrive more or less fresh (and on time) on Friday morning at the university after the student evening on Thursday .
In his luxury suit from “hush, hush, no brand”, Mbappé skillfully distilled the messages he wanted to convey, with a smile, and not without pretty hints of irony that amused the gallery. As when he took advantage of the question of his image rights – which occupied a good part of the negotiations with the PSG but also in the French team – to slip a small one to the president of the French Football Federation, Noël Le Graët .
“What’s funny is that before this rally in March, I don’t think anyone wrote an article, not even a brief one, on image rights. This had to happen for there to be a lot of stuff [qui sortent à son sujet] : he doesn’t want to do this, he doesn’t want to do that, he has a problem with so and so, he wants more bonuses than the other players in the France team. The president talked about it too, right? I heard. Yeah, I heard [rires] ! But there is no problem […] There was this little misunderstanding in the selection, but we are going to settle it intelligently because there is a competition coming up, we are not going to create problems for nothing, we have a country to win. »
“The club’s project has changed”
This passage would have almost made us forget that we were above all there to talk about PSG and its contract extension, after months of a telenovela with thousands of twists and turns. Basically, we learned nothing more than what we already knew more or less in recent hours. That his final choice had been made in the last days preceding the announcement at the Parc des Princes against Metz and that he had wanted to personally call Florentino Perez, the flouted Madrid president, to tell him the news. “They did everything well for me, they tried to make me as happy as possible, to facilitate my arrival and, for that, I thank them, he explained. As a respectful man, it was my duty to speak to him personally. »
For the rest, nothing crazy. Mbappé justified his change of point of view compared to last summer, when he asked to leave PSG to join Madrid, with a classic but always effective “the years follow each other but are not alike”. Ok, Plato. If he has changed his mind, he says, it’s because the context has changed. In addition to the “sentimental” side which makes him attached to his country – and that he will come to spend his old days there – the Parisian number 7 above all mentioned the paradigm shift underway at Paris Saint-Germain since Saturday evening. . “The project has changed, he assured. The club wants to change a lot of things on the sporting level and that made me want to continue. I think my story here is not over and I still have great chapters to write. »
Mbappé and the “full sporting powers”
After having had (without officially asking for it) the head of Leonardo, with whom Mbappé’s entourage had not had any relationship for weeks, even months, and having seen PSG appoint Luis Campos, with whom he has been close for that the latter brought him to Monaco in 2013, Mbappé understood that Paris was in tune with its desire to make him the center of its project. If he will never say it, of course, his contract extension is intimately linked to the fact that Paris will now base its future sporting decisions on their compatibility with the child-king. Nothing more logical, finally. Even if it will not be as rude as a nightly call from Mbappé to Al-Khelaïfi to say “Hey Nasser, that coach? Me, alive, never. »
This was the central message of this press conference. Asked by a colleague about “the full sporting powers” granted or not to Mbappé to extend to PSG, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi drowned the fish with more or less agility, recalling that since the first day he knows him, ” what Kylian likes is to talk about football, nothing else”. Then the French international leaned over the microphone to personally set the record straight.
“I allow myself to intervene, even if the question is not for me. I still remain a football player, I am anchored in a collective, even if there are (different) statutes in a team, and I will not go beyond this function. Of course, if we have to talk about football… I love football, everyone knows my passion and knows that I like to talk about football, but I will never go beyond my function as a football player, ” he wanted to clarify. Ditto for the captaincy, which he does not need to “give [s] point of view and lead by example on the ground”. On arrival, everything was done to show that the club is not destined to become Kylian Saint-Germain. However, this is not what the logo designed on the occasion of the announcement of its extension says: “Kylian is Paris”.