Why the “Project Mbappe” Phenomenon Is Not The Pathway In Creating the Next Football Star | OneFootball

If you’re anything like me, you use social media a lot. All over these platforms, there are millions of pieces of football content, such as game highlights, interviews and player edits.

And ever since the late 2010s, every so often, you see something incredible: a young child, trained by their parents since one or two years of age, and at the age of six, they can strike a half-volley perfectly into the bottom corner, or dribble the ball through a maze of cones.

For a moment, you wonder if you really are looking at the childhood of a future star – let’s look into this trend, labelled by many as “Project Mbappe”.

A REALISTIC DREAM?

Almost always, this impression that the child on the screen will go professional one day is wrong.

Take the case of Iranian Arat Hosseini, who went viral at six years of age in 2019 as the “Iranian Messi” and had already gotten into the Liverpool academy after famous online clips of him doing rainbow flicks and showing incredible strength for his age.

Shortly after, he was released from the academy, moved back to Iran, and has since started training in other sports, such as Padel and Hockey. While Arat still possesses great skill in football for his age, he no longer has an obvious pathway to the top as a pro, and it’s yet to be seen what effect his early training will have on him in the future.

Sadly, cases like Arat’s are surprisingly common, and while it may seem at first as a great way to develop your child into a football star, there are many reasons why it almost never works.

The only thing the ‘Project Mbappe’ development plan has going for it is that focused expertise on football from a young age was statistically more likely to produce a good player in the future than other methods. Or at least it was the only thing going for it.

THE FOOTBALLER DREAM

After a study conducted at Purdue University, research showed that “people who show the greatest promise in their discipline as children rarely went on to reach the pinnacle of their field as adults”. The findings also discredit the ‘10,000 hours rule’, which states that if somebody spends 10,000 hours practising a skill, they will reach mastery of said skill.

The findings completely change the credibility of deliberate practice theory, which suggests that the path to the pinnacle of your field is consistent practice from a young age. It’s a theory that comes very heavily into play in fields such as music and chess, and is the same theory that backs up the ‘Project Mbappe’ development method.

Research instead shows that top performers in fields tend to be relative ‘late bloomers’, and often practice multiple disciplines at a young age, rather than just focusing everything on one area of expertise. While the research doesn’t suggest that you don’t have to practice to become an elite footballer, they show that you don’t have to be the absolute best as a child in order to become the best as an adult.

The final conclusion of this study is that being a child prodigy is not only unnecessary to become a world-class performer, but that, in fact, few world-class performers were prodigies as kids. What this means for this piece is that the ‘Project Mbappe’ method is not a reliable pathway to developing a football star.

You can even look at past child prodigies, viral sensations such as Hachim Mastour, Zakaria Bakkali, Ravel Morrison, and Ansu Fati, to see living proof of this study. Young stars have incredibly more pressure on their shoulders, experience on their legs, and burnout in their mind. It’s a landmine of obstacles that only the best wonderkids, such as Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappe, can navigate.

You then also look at how these plans ultimately play out. Many complaints have surfaced in recent years about an increase in parent intensity at their child’s football matches, with French newspaper 20 minutes doing a piece on the uprising trend. In the piece, it was reported that parent violence and criticism at games was higher than ever before, and that many parents have their children on an “Mbappe plan”.

This ultimately creates an environment which discourages young children, makes for toxic and unwelcoming environments in youth football. One parent had even allegedly asked why his child’s coach wasn’t teaching tactics at the U6 level.

Is There A Correct Route of Development?

The question now is, what is the right path to developing a football star? The answer is that there’s not one definitive path, as the ‘Project Mbappe’ idea suggests. There are football academies for a reason, and development paths are different across the world. In America, young players can develop through the High School and College pathway, the MLS NXT pathway, or by playing for high-level Rep teams and getting scouted by European academies.

Young promising players in Europe usually join their local club’s academy. In Brazil, many footballers get their start in street Varzea tournaments. Different things work for different people. Part of the beauty of this world comes from the fact that everybody is different from one another, and that people need different conditions to help them click. Football is no different.

All in all, despite parents’ urges to live vicariously through their children, don’t make them train ridiculously hard for football from a young age. Becoming a football star isn’t about being able to perfectly strike a volley before you learn the alphabet, or being able to do a rainbow flick before learning multiplication.

The path to the top is just as much mental as it is physical. You need to be able to get up every morning and keep training, keep honing your craft, but not so much as to lose all the fun of playing football. More than anything, football is meant to be a fun pastime, an escape from everything else going on in the world, an escape from reality, and if it becomes the reality you try to escape from, a change is needed.