On social media, a father’s testimony reveals the overwhelming pressure and violence that sometimes plague the sidelines of football fields from the age of six. His son came out traumatized from his first football practice.
The story of this young dad has had a shocking effect. Behind the now common expression of “Mbappé project,” the testimony of a father, shared on social media, tells of what this obsession with sporting success can produce in terms of more worrying consequences. Children pushed too hard, parents consumed by the dream of a professional contract, and young football sometimes turned into a family projection ground.
In his shared testimony, the father recounts that after discovering football with his friends at school, his son wanted to experience club practice. While he was on the sidelines to support his child, he discovered other parents with a completely different ambition: “From the warm-up, I felt a tension that I had not anticipated. Dads, literally in a trance, who criticized their sons for every missed control as if they were playing their lives on a stabilizer.”
“Until then, we can talk about a lack of benevolence, but the violent scene that his six-year-old son experienced during the final match only reinforced his impression of the aggressiveness and animosity surrounding football, even among the youngest. ‘A kid from the other team got the ball and started to run towards my son. And then, I heard the other kid’s father shouting, veins bulging in his neck: ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’ Then, when his son succeeded in a tricky dribble against mine, he unleashed a ‘SHIIIII’ (that guttural, almost tribal cry that kids imitate from their idols). It was a symbolic violence of unparalleled intensity,” the father recounts, shocked by the scene.
The young father eventually confided in what affected him the most and made him immediately decide that his son would not return to football: “The ride back home was the hardest. Usually, on the bike, my little one never stops chirping, asking me a thousand questions about trees, cars, the world… But here, nothing. Complete silence. He sat there, motionless, with a somewhat empty look. It’s the first time I sensed a fear of the world in him.”
For several years, the “Mbappé project” has been used to refer to these paths that some parents imagine they can follow to turn their sons into football stars: extra training sessions, constant demands, imposed sacrifices, monitoring every match. This way of doing things often has disastrous consequences on children’s practice for whom football is no longer a pleasure, as well as on the life of clubs by polluting the general atmosphere of a team and the management of coaches.
However, the paradox is there. In an interview with Wilfrid Mbappé, whose name unwittingly serves as a model for these ambitions, wanted to debunk this myth and never actually implemented any project, while admitting to having made mistakes.
