🎙️ They started calling me a monkey: Mbappé admits he wanted to retire | OneFootball

Kylian Mbappé, captain of the France national team and Real Madrid star, has described on the podcast 'The Bridge', hosted by his teammate Aurélien Tchouaméni, one of the bitterest episodes of his career.

Euro 2021 still brings back painful memories for Mbappé. In particular, the racism he suffered after missing his penalty against Switzerland when he was just 22 years old.

"They started calling me a monkey. I said to myself: 'For me, the national team is the very top, and I’m putting above everything else people who drag you down to the very bottom if you don’t score.' That changed my relationship with the national team a lot. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket because they grab that basket and throw it away straight away. It was very brutal for me. I went on vacation and for the first few days I was like a walking dead man. When I joined the national team, I won the World Cup right away, I was a national hero. I told myself: 'Ah, France is great!'. And then suddenly you get hit with that in the face. It was hard," he confessed.

Mbappé admits that he thought about never wearing the France shirt again and even met with Noël Le Graët, then president of the French Football Federation, to express how he felt. 

"I told him I didn’t want to come back anymore. I play for people who think I’m a monkey if I don’t score. I can’t play for people like that," he admitted. He also explains how Le Graët convinced him to change his mind.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.

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