When Kylian Mbappe first announced in 2021 that he wanted to leave Paris Saint-Germain, his mother Fayza Lamari agreed to an interview to defuse the situation.
She initially made light of his public statement. She said they were still talking to PSG about possibly extending his contract, that negotiations were going well and that, while he had always dreamed of playing for Real Madrid, he was fulfilling a fantasy in Paris, too.
When asked whether, in fact, the desire to move to Madrid stemmed from her rather than from her son, she laughed.
“His dad wanted him to stay, and the lawyer and I wanted him to leave,” she told Le Parisien with remarkable candour. “(But) none of us three decide. When Kylian wants something, you can (try to) do whatever you want. (But) he will do it.”
“It is,” she added with a smile, “his Kabyle side that stands out.”
Since Mbappe dropped his latest bombshell at PSG, sending that letter to state he will not be triggering the option to extend his contract beyond next summer, he has been in the firing line and so too, inevitably, have his representatives.
Primarily that means his mother, who has become the driving force in the discussions over his future, handling those highly charged conversations with the PSG hierarchy and, if things go the way he hopes and expects, whether this summer or next, the negotiations to take him to Madrid.
Initially, Mbappe’s parents represented him jointly along with a lawyer, Delphine Verheyden. His father Wilfried took care of the football side and his mother the commercial side.
The couple are now separated, although they remain on good terms. While the pair complement each other in their handling of Kylian’s career, Lamari, along with Verheyden, has become more influential, particularly when it comes to negotiating with clubs.
Kylian Mbappe and his father Wilfried (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images)
That probably makes her the most powerful woman in football; the mother entrusted with guiding and managing the career of the player commonly regarded as the greatest of the post-Lionel-Messi generation.
Lamari, 48, is not afraid to ruffle feathers. Last summer, she and Mbappe allowed his contract at PSG to run down to the final five weeks, holding talks with Madrid and appearing to play the two clubs off against each other before he signed a new deal in Paris worth a reported €40million (£34.2m; $43.7m) a year.
Had one of the male “super agents” like Jorge Mendes or the late Mino Raiola pulled off a deal like that, it would have been hailed as a masterclass.
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Lamari doesn’t get the same press. She is cast as “difficult”, which calls to mind a famous description of the former UK prime minister Theresa May as a “bloody difficult woman”. There is still an expectation in some quarters that women in business — and particularly in a business as male-dominated as football — are not allowed to be difficult.
She feels that to represent her son’s interests properly, she has no choice but to fight his corner, whether that means taking an uncompromising approach to contract negotiations, trying to outmanoeuvre men as powerful as PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Madrid president Florentino Perez or firing back at those who talk badly of him: journalists, fans, team-mates or a team-mate’s mother in the case of Veronique Rabiot after Kylian’s missed penalty against Switzerland in the Euro 2020 round of 16.
“He had become the one to be shot in the public square,” Lamari told Le Parisien about the criticism her son faced after that tournament. “And there, it is the mother who intervenes. He’s 22 (now 24) and he’s going to make mistakes, but he didn’t deserve everything that happened to him. So in that situation, I go out like a wolf.”
And here, too, she suggests it comes back to what she calls her “Kabyle side”.
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Like Mbappe, Lamari was born in Bondy on the outskirts of Paris, but her parents belonged to a Berber ethnic group in the mountainous Kabylia region of northern Algeria.
By all accounts, that “Kabyle side” characterised Lamari’s approach on the handball court, playing for AS Bondy when they competed in France’s top tier in the late 1990s.
“She was a symbolic figure of the handball club of Bondy,” Jean-Louis Kimmoun, the club’s former president, told Le Parisien in 2017. “She grew up just opposite our playing hall and many of her brothers played for the club. On the court, she was a fighter and sometimes things got quite rough when she met her opponents. Many of them remember playing against Fayza.”
Mbappe meets fans in Bondy (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images)
Al-Khelaifi would relate to that. So might Perez and Madrid chief executive Jose Angel Sanchez, who were both left shocked when, having given considerable hope and encouragement, they were rejected last year as Mbappe signed an enormous new deal in Paris.
Throughout last year’s negotiations with Madrid — which were permitted under FIFA regulations as Mbappe was in the final six months of his contract — she was said to be respectful but utterly uncompromising.
No matter how many concessions she won from the biggest club in world football — Madrid were even willing to surrender the commercial rights to Mbappe’s image in order to sign him — she retained the poker face of the most experienced negotiator.
“She is implacable,” said a source at the Spanish club, who, like all cited in this piece, spoke anonymously due to the sensitivity of the situation. “She tells you, ‘No’ — and she doesn’t leave an inch. She wanted more.”
In the summer of 2011, a 12-year-old Mbappe, who was starting to cause a stir in the youth teams at AS Bondy, was invited to a trial at Chelsea.
He had been recommended by Daniel Boga, who had been scouting for Chelsea since his brother Jeremie (now at Atalanta) joined the Premier League club’s academy in 2009.
“At the beginning, I was speaking to the dad,” Boga tells The Athletic. “But then his mum came, and when that happened you could feel she was the one who controlled everything. She was the one talking to the club.
“The dad didn’t really talk. He’s very calm and relaxed. The mum is like fire — bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam! At the trial, he never said to his son, ‘Dribble, do this, do this.’ He might say afterwards, ‘Next time, you have to pass it.’ But the mum, next to the pitch, was like, ‘Kylian, take the ball! Take him on! Go! Shoot!’”
But it was what happened afterwards that really stuck in Boga’s mind. Jim Fraser, now Chelsea’s head of youth development, explained to Mbappe’s parents that, while they were impressed by his talent, they wanted to see more dedication in his off-the-ball work. Boga’s recollection is that Fraser said, “We want to see him again and we want to see this part of his football.”
Boga, acting as an interpreter, explained this to Mbappe’s parents. “But then the mum said, ‘No, we won’t come again,’” he recalls. “Tell them, ‘He won’t come back. If you want to sign him, you sign him now.’ And she said, ‘In five years’ time, you will come back for him for £50million.’ She said (to me), ‘Translate that!’
“I couldn’t say that; it’s too arrogant to say something like this, so I didn’t translate it. I just said to Jim, ‘I don’t think they will come back, so you have to make a decision now.’”
Mbappe in action for Monaco in 2016, just after he’d turned 17 (Photo: VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)
Clubs don’t like being given ultimatums by any player’s representatives — never mind a parent of a 12-year-old prospect. It’s the kind of approach that is unsustainable unless the player’s talent is extreme. And that was the case with Mbappe.
“She was really confident. She knew her boy was going to make it,” Boga says. “I don’t know how, but she knew it. So she was relaxed. Every time, she told me, ‘Daniel, don’t worry. My boy, he will make it.’ She didn’t know how big he would make it. But for sure she knew he would make it.”
In ‘Je M’Appelle Kylian’, the graphic novel Mbappe released in 2021, his father is characterised as affectionate and wide-eyed, living a dream through his son.
His mother is depicted differently — a source of constant encouragement with his schoolwork and music lessons, but otherwise more cynical, contrarian, perhaps a little frustrated by the simple worldview of her husband and children. So many pages seem to end with her walking away, rolling her eyes at her son’s (and husband’s) childish excesses.
In one sequence, she demands a meeting with Luis Campos (then Monaco’s sporting director, and now PSG’s — largely on Mbappe’s recommendation) because her son is bored of his training regime with under-17s coach Bruno Irles. It ends with Mbappe being allowed to train separately and Lamari, having got her way, telling Campos not to forget that “Kylian is mentally strong” and, unlike some of his peer group at Monaco, “he has parents present.”
Another sequence, tellingly, has Mbappe and his father dreaming of glory and riches at PSG, about to sign on the dotted line, when Lamari asks him if he is really sure about this. “You’re a genius at football, Kylian,” she says. “Aren’t you going to be bored in Ligue 1?”
Dernier tweet du thread.
Alors que les négociations avancent très bien et que l’avocate Delphine Verheyden relit le contrat, Fayza Lamari, mère de K.Mbappé lâche une bombe et redemande à Kylian s’il est bien sûr de vouloir signer au PSG, car il risque de s’ennuyer en Ligue 1. pic.twitter.com/3KuZubmF46— Tournevis dans le paf ???? (@AlexPVNAME) December 21, 2021
If she was unsure about the PSG transfer when he was 18, she was positively convinced he should move by the time he had run his contract down to its final months last season.
“She learned that the player only really has a lot of power when he is a free agent or when he is in the final year of his contract,” another agent says. “They know that, otherwise, they would not be in a scenario where they can make so much money.”
Lamari has not always felt in control. When Mbappe made his spectacular breakthrough at Monaco as an 18-year-old, winning the 2016-17 Ligue 1 title, scoring 26 goals in all competitions (including six en route to the Champions League semi-finals), it all became too much.
“I wondered what was going on,” she told Le Parisien four years later. “He had become Justin Bieber — and that scared me. Between (the two matches against) Manchester City (in February and March 2017) and his transfer to PSG (at the end of the summer transfer window), I gained 24kg. At the beginning, it is very difficult because you are not prepared for that.”
Mbappe joined PSG in 2017 (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images)
Lamari and her then-husband had previously been on a journey with their adopted son Jires Kembo Ekoko, now 35 and retired after playing for Stade Rennais and clubs in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey. It had made them wise to some of the pitfalls of the football industry.
But Mbappe’s talent and potential made it all the more challenging for a family of modest means — his father was a football coach and his mother a coordinator in the recreation department in Bondy’s local authority — so they sought help.
“First, I met five lawyers, names well established in the world of football,” Lamari said in an interview last week with Tribune de Geneve. “To better understand their attitude, I deliberately didn’t tell them I was his mother. I arrived at the meeting without meeting their standards; I weighed 30kg more and I was dressed modestly.
“It was all about money and commissions. ‘Don’t worry Madame, you’re not paying me. We will pay ourselves with the contract negotiated with the club.’ This orientation bothered me.”
So instead Mbappe and his family went with Verheyden, who said she had no interest in football and would charge them at her hourly rate. “It was important to have someone who could advise us without being drawn to the money,” she said. “I told Kylian to meet her and he approved. I told him to see the good side of things — that if he became the champion he was to become, two women would take care of him in addition to his dad. It was a snub to the male world that is football.”
When Remi Dupre, a journalist for the newspaper Le Monde, first encountered Mbappe during the player’s time at the Clairefontaine academy, he says he “had the impression that the boss was Wilfried”. But over time, Lamari’s influence has grown.
KEWJF (which stands for Kylian, Ethan, Wilfried, Jires, Fayza) started out as a small company to handle Mbappe’s commercial arrangements. It is now a considerably bigger enterprise with a team of advisers extending to marketing and commercial affairs. It had a turnover of €12.2million in 2021 (up from €11.6 million the previous year) and those figures are only going to grow in proportion to Mbappe’s profile.
And while the F for Fayza might be at the end of the acronym, she is increasingly leading the company from the front.
By the spring of 2022, Perez was convinced he had got his man, as he and Madrid almost invariably do. Lamari has suggested, not for the first time, that she felt Mbappe should move to Spain.
But negotiations with PSG continued throughout. Much of the time, even when strained, they were civil.
To some in the PSG hierarchy, it seemed Mbappe’s parents had a coordinated strategy: his father turning up in Al-Khelaifi’s private box at the Parc des Princes, sweet-talking the club president and making all the right noises even as Lamari was talking to Madrid on the same day.
To others, it seemed to reflect a degree of chaos with the two parents, now separated, following different agendas.
PSG were bending over backwards for Mbappe, offering not only an immense wage and signing-on fee but a significant say in the club’s future plans — and, such was their desperation to avoid losing him on a free transfer last summer, a short-term deal to June 2024 with the option — his option — of extending for another year, which meant they would soon be in the position to be “difficult” once more.
Mbappe holds his 2022-2023 Ligue 1 championship trophy (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“He (Mbappe) is the one who makes all the decisions, including staying at PSG in May 2022,” says Dupre. “Yes, obviously there is a lot of pressure: political pressure, sports pressure, media pressure. But did he decide? Yes. I think he makes his decisions himself but that his family has a strong influence. He wouldn’t make these decisions without consulting his parents and his lawyer.”
It has emerged that the letter Mbappe sent PSG last week, rejecting the option of a further year at the club, was dated July 15 last year — just less than two months after he signed his new deal and was paraded at the Parc des Princes wearing a shirt with “Mbappe 2025” on the back.
Opinions vary as to whether the Mbappe camp comprehensively outwitted PSG — a lucrative short-term contract almost entirely on his terms, meaning he could retain leverage and still get his dream move to Madrid sooner or later — or whether they have tied themselves in knots, signing such a huge contract only to go cold on the idea within weeks.
Lamari has said it was simply a case of representing her son’s interests. The way she describes it, the final decision will always lie with the player — and it will be likewise with Mbappe’s brother Ethan, 16, who is a promising midfielder in PSG’s academy.
Boga, now an agent, feels inclined to applaud the brinksmanship involved in establishing the “power” over PSG. “Can you imagine?” he says. “You sign a two-year contract with a one-year option — and the option is the player’s. I don’t know how the club accepted this.
“A year later, the club is in a position where again he has only one year left. So either they sell the player now or they lose him for nothing or they will have to extend and give him another €100million.”
But, once more, Boga wonders whether this approach would backfire if we were talking about anything but an elite-level talent. When you are representing someone on the level of Mbappe, he says, the usual rules of engagement don’t apply.
A source who has been privy to previous negotiations involving Mbappe, says: “She (Lamari) is one of the most powerful people in football because she has an unbeatable product.
“And she’s very clever. She has understood everything. She has no background as an agent, but she is very smart about life. She listens and, if she understands the other person’s arguments, she appreciates them and knows how to be guided. She has a lawyer (Verheyden) who explains everything to her and she sets the strategy.
“She played with two of the most powerful clubs in the world to get the best deal for her son. It’s her family and her money. She lives for it. She defends her son a lot, so he can’t reproach her for anything.”
In an interview with Paris Match ahead of the 2018 World Cup, Mbappe touched on his relationship with his mother.
“I tell her everything — even (about) my girlfriends!” he said. “She knows everything. She’s my confidante.”
He also explained how his mother buys his clothes for him. “We have the same tastes,” he said. “She takes pictures and sends them to me. But often she buys without asking me — and she’s not mistaken. We have a real bond for that, too.”
Mbappe drew a contrast between his relationship with his father, with whom he talks almost exclusively about football, and that with his mother, with whom car journeys would be spent listening and singing along to French artists of the 1980s like Patrick Bruel and Daniel Balavoine.
But Lamari is not shy of bringing her son down a peg or two. “Don’t think you are taller than you are!” is one line she has recounted in interviews. Even when she has heard commentators and reporters singing the player’s praises, she has been known to pull them up: “He’s a footballer. He didn’t invent the rabies vaccine” or “He’s not Abbe Pierre (the priest who was synonymous with the French Resistance movement and helping the poor and the homeless).”
Mbappe with his mother Fayza, Melissa Gateau and his nephew and niece (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images)
In a 2021 interview, also with Paris Match, Lamari recounted the family’s sense of unease when Mbappe joined PSG (initially on loan) in the summer of 2017 and saw his salary reach a level far beyond their wildest dreams.
“For three years, we didn’t touch the money,” she said. “We had the poor man’s syndrome; I was afraid that they would wake me up and say, ‘Give the money back.’ We started investing about a year ago.
“His relationship with money is unique. He never has a credit card or money on him. Sometimes I say to him, ‘Don’t you want to take €200 with you?’ He replies, ‘No need. I’m just going to play football.’ He’s not a big spender.”
“We are incredibly lucky to have money, but it is not an end in itself. Kylian doesn’t play football for money. If he did, he couldn’t have succeeded in everything he does.”
Mbappe’s own ‘Inspired by KM’ charitable foundation sponsors 49 boys and 49 girls from a variety of social backgrounds to help them gain the education and skills to build a career while also committing to passing on those lessons to others in future.
He is invested in numerous other social initiatives, but it is no secret that Inspired by KM is also heavily inspired by FL. From an early age, she has insisted that he use his fortune and fame as a force for good.
In that Tribune de Geneve interview, she stated, “His life as a man is more important than his life as a footballer. He has this ability to give people pleasure, to create emotions. My greatest pride will be what he will build as a man.”
And yet, it would be an understatement to say that Mbappe and his representatives, particularly Lamari, know his value and are determined to maximise it.
Quite apart from the football issues at PSG — another disappointing Champions League campaign, the uncomfortable dynamic on the pitch and in the dressing room with Messi (who is now heading to Inter Miami) and Neymar, the continuing failure to build around a core of homegrown players — one of the Mbappe camp’s frustrations is that the commercial rights to his image are largely owned by the club.
In April, he took to Instagram to express his unhappiness after what he called a “basic interview at a club marketing day” was used as a voiceover in a video to promote season tickets for 2023-24. “That is why I fight for individual image rights,” he said. “PSG is a big club and a big family, but it is certainly not Kylian Saint-Germain.”
This is a line PSG have heard from Lamari. But it has become something of a cause for Mbappe over the past couple of years. In March last year, he led a boycott of certain commercial activities by members of the France squad who didn’t want to be associated with certain products. Six months later, shortly before the World Cup in Qatar, he chose not to participate in a photoshoot over a dispute — which was swiftly resolved — over the squad’s image-rights arrangements.
Mbappe following his magnificent performance in the 2022 World Cup final (Photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
He knows his worth. His mother makes sure of that. Dupre suggests Mbappe has grown far beyond football: “a brand, a political object, an advertising poster, an ambassador for the suburbs. The model, for the family, is Michael Jordan.”
There is a sense of delight as Dupre considers the blossoming — on the pitch and off it — of the boy he first encountered at Clairefontaine a decade ago.
But at the same time, he wonders about the pressure Mbappe faces to be this “polymorphic” brand, “this ‘multiple role’ that we (the nation) want to assign to him today.”
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“He isn’t just a footballer,” Dupre says. “But at the same time, he is only 24 years old and he is just a footballer. You don’t want to overdo it. It’s a strange position, obviously, for the family.”
It is. And clearly, there are risks reputation-wise, brand-wise and, of course, personally, in trying to force a transfer from a club as big and as powerful as PSG have become.
But, as Lamari said a couple of years ago, when Mbappe wants something, he almost always gets his way. It must be something in the genes.
Additional reporting: Adam Crafton, Stuart James, Mario Cortegana
(Top photo: Guillaume Herbaut; Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
