Bondy gave Mbappe an early code: You respect others. You remain humble. And you love football. "A place like Bondy simply has values you keep wherever you go," Mbappe says. In the last five years, since he left to pursue his football dreams, this has been a city under repair, with many of the older housing complexes getting knocked down. There are construction workers hanging from structures all over, and they are building upward.
In early September, Mbappe returned to the site of a childhood pitch near his old school—"at the time, it was tar and sand and more holes," he says—to christen a renovated stadium. The locals, willing the area's rejuvenation into existence, call it Mbappe Field. Three posters near the upgraded pitch had, by the time B/R Mag visited nearly seven weeks later, been ripped off the walls. "Everyone wanted a piece of him," says a kid playing on the nouveau-camouflage pitch, despite the park being closed for the day.
"When I used to tell people I was from Bondy, they would ask about the violence and drug use," Ahmed says. "Now, they all ask me about Kylian Mbappe and if I know him."
The mural, which remains plastered over his former coach's building, put Mbappe in the company of French sporting royalty: The footwear-sponsored art installation is a distinction previously awarded only to Zidane himself. Now, a giant Mbappe overlooks the road connecting Bondy to the Peripherique, the large highway that joins the suburbs to Paris. (That passage, locals joke, requires a visa.) His hands are making the sign-language signal for "I love you," as a scroll unfurls behind his head.
