The race for the Ballon d’Or risks having serious consequences on the life of the France team. According to information from Spanish insider Juan Jesus, the relationship between Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé is “officially dead”.
A necessarily problematic situation as the two men must meet next Monday for the first gathering of the Zidane era.
The detonator of this open crisis lies in the recent media outings of the French attacker. Ousmane Dembélé’s entourage was initially outraged to see Kylian Mbappé publicly proclaiming himself as “the chosen one”. But the real spark has been reignited by a much sharper barb: the assertion that some recent Ballon d’Or winners are not the true best players in the world, unlike the days of the undisputed supremacy of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
For the Dembélé clan, there is no doubt: it is a frontal, remote-controlled and deliberately humiliating attack against the Parisian attacker. His media response therefore amounts to a carefully calculated revenge. On RMC, consultant Jérôme Rothen confirmed this extreme tension: “Ousmane Dembélé took Kylian Mbappé’s comments very badly, that’s for sure, and he is very angry with Kylian! This is a form of betrayal! »
Already the beginnings of the World Cup
On and off the field, the consequences of this schism are immediate. According to the details provided by Juan Jesus, there is no longer the slightest contact between the two men. They who exchanged several messages daily did not speak this weekend.
The beginnings of this situation were nevertheless already perceptible after the elimination of France against Spain in the World Cup. In a locker room plunged into dead silence, Mbappé and Dembélé did not speak to each other once before boarding their vacation planes separately.
Faced with the danger of seeing this toxic climate corrupt his debut with the Blues, Zinedine Zidane plans to plan a face-to-face meeting between the two men in order to prevent this situation from spreading in the French locker room. “There are now two teams in the French team,” warned Jérôme Rothen.
