Goodbye Kylian Mbappe The move from PSG to Real Madrid didn’t change anything. Ashraf Hakimi He felt it, but at the same time he was happy to see his friend achieve his dream of wearing white. If anyone knew everything that was going on in the French captain’s mind during that last turbulent season in Paris, it was the Moroccan player, who knew how to maintain his distance in this conflict between his club and his friend.
The passage of time has not changed the relationship between them.. Most recently, in the stands of the Rabat stadium, one could see Mbappe watching Achraf in the second match of the African Cup. “It’s always a pleasure to welcome a friend to my country. Kilian loves Morocco, he comes often, he likes this country, its culture and gastronomy,” commented the former Madrid player.
Nobody likes to lose or see their friend do it, especially because of him. But one of the two will fall on the 9th at Boston Stadium. For Ashraf, this is revenge after losing in the semi-finals of the World Cup in Qatar. What the Real Madrid forward won’t be able to do is visit a friend before the fight, as he did in Doha on France’s only day off. Then they were only a few kilometers from each other in the city of Qatar, but this time there is no way.
But Mbappe and Achraf will have a special duel from the very beginning. The two captains will take a photograph for history. This is one of the biggest differences when it comes to grief. At that time, Romain Saiss was the captain of the Moroccan national team, and Hugo Lloris was the captain of the French national team. In two years, the leap was important for both. Both became captains of their teams. Kylian fulfills his role as both a goalscorer and a leader, while Achraf, despite playing as a striker, is an all-round player, as was the case with Luis Enrique at PSG.
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Mbappe and Achraf also faced each other at club level. It was last summer at the Club World Championship. In the semi-finals it was the same as in Qatar, but in this case the Moroccan was in the lead and in what way. 4:0 in favor of PSG against Xabi Alonso’s Madrid.
“During the 2022 World Cup, we talked and played together online every day,” Mbappe explains in Aurélien Tchouameni’s “Bridge” program, which they both attended. But the Real Madrid player went further and said that even on the same field, when the semi-final was at stake, they both talked about vacation. “I think all we did for an hour and a half was talk. We were organizing a vacation because we were going together, he asked me if my family had been to the stadium… And I answered: Yes, they are all there!”
“It was a little difficult,” remembers Kilian during those concentrated days in Doha, “because we kept talking, but you could tell that something was strange. Until we saw each other in the tunnel and laughed. He sent me a message: today you don’t really want to talk to me… Besides, it was a semi-final! It’s not like it was a group stage match,” recalls the Frenchman.
Thus began their friendship and Kylian’s great decision.
PSG decided to take a gamble on Achraf, paying Inter 60 million at the height of the pandemic, and he is now an established player in Paris. His adaptation was not easy. Although the huge Moroccan community in the French capital, the city’s second largest, helped him feel at home, on the pitch and in the Paris dressing room he did not find his place until Mbappe approached him soon after. The South Americans dominated under Di Maria. Mbappe and Ashraf (at that time they were 23 and 24 years old) quickly found a common language. They shared the same hobbies and began hanging out together outside the field.
The closeness is so great that the defender admitted that he was one of the few who knew about his friend’s decision to stay at PSG that summer when Madrid almost did so, but the player eventually signed his latest extension. “Let’s see, my teammates found out about it on the field, but since I’m friends with him, I found out about it a few days before. I got calls from people who haven’t written to me for years and asked what my friend was going to do,” the defender commented in La Resistencia.