Due to a latent administrative dispute with the French Football Federation, the star striker will not take part in the Blues photo shoot ahead of the World Cup.
Kylian Mbappé is once again shaking up the codes. The soccer star has “decided not to take part in the planned photo shoot” this Tuesday with the France team, ahead of the World Cup. Nothing to do with the disastrous human and ecological toll of the competition in Qatar, this standoff concerns its image rights. While the French Football Federation (FFF) refuses to «modifier [s]a convention», the player “deeply regrets that no agreement could, as requested, be reached before the World Cup”specify its representatives in a press release on Monday.
Image rights are a sensitive subject for the PSG striker, who wants to be able to keep the choice of brands with which his image is associated. In addition, being one of the great stars of the French team, he is always very much in demand by partners during advertising operations.
During a Les Bleus internship in March, Mbappé did not participate in a sponsorship operation at the Clairefontaine training center to show his disagreement with the agreement signed by the internationals with the FFF for the exploitation of their rights to the image.
Disagree on convention, no photo
Mbappé’s representatives maintain that he was able to “explain its position on the need to modify the agreement governing the conditions of use of its image” and ensures that an agreement seemed to have been reached in early June. However the president of the FFF, Noël Le Graët, explained this Monday in The Team what “nothing will change between now and the World Cup”.
The star had already been called to order last May. Le Graët had threatened the player, in the newspaper The Team, to no longer receive income related to the image rights of the Blues. When he announced that he was staying at Paris Saint-Germain last May, Mbappé had calmed things down. The striker then mentioned a “little misunderstanding” with the Federation, promising to “settle all this quickly with intelligence and respect”.
Two days later, Noël Le Graët had assured the microphone of France Inter: “There will be a global meeting with all the players, and the lawyer, I will receive her when she wants”. He received it at the beginning of June. “We have twelve sponsors, obviously everyone asks for Mbappé, it can be understood that at times he is annoyed. We’ll settle it quietly […] Maybe we need to rethink things a bit.”, admitted the leader. But things dragged on. And that ignited the fire.
But don’t panic, Mbappé still wants to make it clear that this “obviously does not call into question his total commitment and his determination to contribute to the collective success of the national team for the important sporting events to come”.