Father of one of the best footballers on the planet, Wilfrid Mbappé was also an educator at the Bondy amateur club for more than twenty years. So when it comes to talking about inappropriate parental behavior in the world of football, his voice counts. Asked about the subject by the magazine L’Équipe, he first castigated the new violent attitudes on the part of certain families: “Everyone is surprised because it is not common and not normal. For me, there is an impassable red line, it is violence. We can have words but you don’t have to grab an educator or a center manager and shake him in front of everyone, ”he said. Before adding, by way of explanation: “Football has changed. When I started, the passion for the game came before social success. Today, parents know what an aspirant contract is.
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A change due in large part – essentially? – to what is now called “football business”, that is to say the search for and maximization of profits to the detriment of human values ??and passion. But for Wilfrid Mbappé, parents who give in to the sirens of money are not to blame: “The land of money is easy. A father who loses his job at 1,200 euros and has six children, if you offer 20,000 euros to his son to go play in Bordeaux, what do you want him to say? And by what right can you judge him? After all, the child will continue to play football and everyone is a winner,” he says.
Specifying later that the round ball must above all be a story of passion and not money: “It’s not normal for a 10-year-old child to tell me: ‘I want to earn as much money as Kylian’ . It is that the entourage or the social networks have put it in his head. We did a Kylian Mbappé because we weren’t looking to do a Kylian Mbappé.”
For him, the problem is elsewhere. Rather, he is on the side of players in the world of football who are interested in younger and younger players and who do not hesitate to make countless – and sometimes untenable – promises to parents to attract the best talents: ” It’s not normal for a child to have an agent at 12. When you start getting interested in 9 or 10 year olds, how do you expect the parent to keep a level head? How far are we going to go? In the maternity ward, because the baby’s father is a super player?, he explains. It is also not normal for a parent to stop working or become an agent because they have a talented little one. But in this context, one can understand that if promises are made and not kept, the parents lose their temper.”
However, if many things have changed negatively in a few years, not everything is to be thrown away at the youth level. On the contrary: “But I’m not saying that the football before was better, you have to live in your time. There are some very good things today, we are bringing out more talent. Everyone just has to stay in their place”, explains the father of “KM7”. Good advice for parents who hope their child will become the new Kylian Mbappé.
