For Kylian Mbappe, it was never Lionel Messi. The group that fired up his imagination, as a restless teenager growing up in the banlieue of Bondy where blares a mural of the French forward with the line "a place of possibilities", were always the galacticos. In his comic-strip autobiography Je M'Appelle Kylian, Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo visit him in a dream, and Zidane hands him out a sparkling- white kit of Real Madrid. He plays keepie-uppie in it.
In school, when a teacher asks him about his best friends, Mbappe lists out the names Ronaldo, Zidane and Sergio Ramos. Later, in interviews, when probed on who he wants to be, it has always been Ronaldo and Zidane.
|
