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Neymar da Silva Santos Junior and Kylian Mbappé Lottin will play on Wednesday at the Santiago Bernabéu against Real Madrid with the PSG shirt and, coincidences of the ball, both have a significant link between them.
The two were training at the Ciudad Deportiva de Valdebebas when they were 14 years old.
Of course, they passed their respective tests with flying colors, but for different reasons none ended up staying at the white club.
The case of the Brazilian brings together even more links of rapprochement with the Madrid entity.
In March 2006, having passed the test, he came to have a federation record with Infantil A and to be registered in the capital.
Five years later, in June 2011, he signed a five-year pre-contract with Real Madrid, conditional on a subsequent agreement with Santos, his club at the time.
Situation that did not occur because it was Barcelona, in 2013, who ended up signing him.
It was the first days of 2006 when the Santiago Bernabéu offices received a call from Wagner Ribeiro, player representative, who had brought Robinho to the club months before.
Since then his relationship with the white entity had been fluid and he offered his technicians the possibility of testing a 13-year-old boy who also played for Santos and who, in his words, would even be better than Robinho himself .
Ribeiro proposed to bear the costs of the boy's trip and his father's.
Neymar's federative file from the 2005-06 season when he was a Real Madrid youth.
JOURNAL AS
This is how the Neymar family landed in Madrid at the end of February.
The day of his first training session at the Ciudad Deportiva was full of uncertainty.
The expectations were great.
As he headed to pitch 10, one of the club hosts wanted to be nice to the player and asked him if he was nervous about the test.
Neymar gave him a forgiving look.
Due to his age, just turned 14, he was assigned to child A, which was trained by Jesús Enrique Gutiérrez.
“Pablo Sarabia, Carvajal, Fran Sol, Alex Fernández were also on that team… I remember him as a petite kid, tiny, with close-cropped hair who from the moment he stepped onto the field showed his skills and as training progressed and we got into in game actions left us all surprised.
I had never seen anything like it in my life,” recalls Gutiérrez;
He “excelled above all with the ball at his feet.
I don't know why he didn't stay, but we all knew he was different."
Fran Sol, now an Eibar player, also has Neymar's arrival in his memory.
“At first we thought that he was one of the many children who came to the test.
He was good, you can see, but since he was so skinny and tiny… A normal and ordinary kid.
When it seemed that he was going to stay and they were going to make the record, we cheered him up and congratulated him, as we did with everyone.
The next day, we were going to play a tournament in Girona and he didn't show up anymore”.
With the test passed, negotiations began.
His father was calling the shots.
The intention of the white coaches is for him to stay in Madrid and finish the season playing with Infantil A, and he processed his file with the Madrid Federation on March 30, 2006. Neymar would sign a non-professional contract with an economic consideration 60,000 euros per year and the club would bear the expenses of the house.
His parents and his sister would come to live with him.
With everything agreed, the father wanted to add one more clause: that Real Madrid pay for a house, in Santos, for the grandparents valued at 55,000 euros.
The financial managers of the club refused.
"We can not pay more money for a 14-year-old boy," settled who had the key to the box.
The last attempt of the sports officials was worth nothing, aware that it was a jewel.
The boy returned to Brazil and a few days later it was announced that he had reached a renewal agreement with Santos in exchange for a 770,000 euro chip and a 9,000 monthly salary.
Years later, Neymar senior confessed that thanks to Real Madrid he had obtained the first million for his son when he was only 14 years old.
Five years later, in June 2011, emissaries from the Bernabéu flew to São Paulo to try to sign him again and a six-year contract with Neymar rests in a safe deposit box at a rate of five million euros net per season plus the loan for The player's share of a percentage of the image rights.
The validity of the document was only subject to reaching an agreement with the Brazilian club and the relevant medical examination.
In July, in Paris, Florentino Pérez in person tried without success to seal the negotiation with the president of Santos, Luis Álvaro de Oliveira, with the intention that the player join the white discipline as soon as possible.
Real Madrid preferred to negotiate rather than settle the matter by paying the 45 million termination clause and tried again in September.
New trip to São Paulo.
Dr. Carlos Díez joins the expedition and with permission from Santos, the player undergoes a medical examination.
Barcelona approached the footballer's father, offered him 37 million euros and Neymar ended up playing alongside Messi and not Cristiano Ronaldo.
Like Neymar, Mbappé also visited Valdebebas as a child prodigy.
Zinedine Zidane, then an adviser to the president, was the one who extended the invitation in person in December 2012. The reports that reached him about a boy who was about to turn 14 were extraordinary.
He was already considered one of the great talents of French football and was part of the elite group of players from the generation of '98 who trained and studied at the Clairefontaine Football Institute.
Mbappé arrived in Madrid accompanied by his parents and his uncle.
His father, Wilfrid, of Cameroonian origin, a former soccer player, at that time was a coach-trainer at Bondy, the team where Kylian had taken his first steps.
His mother, Fayza, had been a professional handball player.
At the age of 11, the boy had already spent a week training with Chelsea in London and at that time several French clubs were already following him: Girondins de Bordeaux, Caen, PSG, Monaco...
In February 2020, in a letter published in
The Players Tribune
, Kylian himself told the story of his visit to Madrid.
“Just before my 14th birthday I had an amazing surprise.
My father received a call from someone from Real Madrid inviting me to go to a training session during the holidays.
They actually told him that Zidane would like to see me.
It was like being on the moon.
He was desperate to go.
I will never forget the moment we arrived at the training center from the airport.
Zidane met us in the parking lot next to his car.
We greeted each other and he offered to take me to the field to train.
He was pointing to the front seat as if to say “go on, get in”, but I froze and asked him if he would take my shoes off.
I was thinking to myself: “I'm in Zizou's car and I'm Kylian from Bondy.
This is not real.
I must still be sleeping on the plane.”
His mother, months later, clarified the reasons for that trip.
“We didn't go to Madrid to find out more about our son's potential, but to make him happy.
He was a Real Madrid fan from a very young age”.
The father added: “They took us to see Real Madrid-Espanyol at the Bernabéu, but the best part was yet to come.
On the first day of training, Kylian was received by Zidane.
Real wanted Kylian, but we had fewer points of reference there”.
Six months later, on July 3, the player signed for Monaco and his father took a year off to be closer to his son.
In Valdebebas, Mbappé was always Kylian
In Valdebebas, Mbappé was always Kylian.
This is how he was presented to his coaches and teammates and this is how he appears in the record of a training match against Cadete A on December 18, 2012. In the first half he played as a right winger and in the second half as a midfielder.
Zidane was present at all of his training sessions.
He was assigned to cadet B, trained by Rubén de la Red, with Joaquín Sánchez as second and Juan Ángel Piñero as physical trainer.
In that template, among others, were Luca Zidane and Achraf.
From Dubai, where he now works as a coach, Rubén de la Red remembers: “He was very finite, tiny.
When he caught the ball he stood out for his speed.
It was lethal.
He is the same player now as he was then.
Technically he didn't stand out that much, the controls could go a bit, but with spaces he generated a lot of danger.
In speed, in the change of pace, he was far superior to the others”.
Joaquín Sánchez, then the second technician, remembers that "without knowing any Spanish, he understood the tasks with an explanation on the blackboard".
He “performed them without making mistakes.
He made very few mistakes.
He was never wrong twice in the same action.
He wasn't particularly combinative, but he was very deep.
His intention to quickly reach the area was evident and there it was very difficult to defend.
He knew how to brake, start, accelerate, take out one more gear.
He modulated his speed.
He was more daring than precise.
He tried to clean rivals.
Observant, shy.
I could see in his eyes that he knew that this was an important moment.
There are children who know how to interpret the moment and he knew it.
Very Real Madrid DNA.
personality in the field.
Obsession to reach the area”.
Piñero, from his role as physical trainer, also controlled his progress.
“He was a little bird, finite, skinny and very fast.
He barely had muscle mass.
High hips.
It is difficult to explain how that finite child has become the physical monster that he is now, especially in what corresponds to the lower body.
It would have been more normal for him to transform into a Jesús Navas, but no.
In the physical aspect, his progression has been even greater than in the technical plane.
So he stood out just for his speed.”
Manu Hernando, now a Tondela player in the Portuguese First Division, was also in that cadet B and admits that until recently he did not know that the little boy who trained with them was Mbappé.
“I found out two years ago that Luca Zidane, when we were at Racing, told me.
He hadn't linked them.
Then I remembered him more and I couldn't believe how much he had changed.
He remembered and days after his test we commented among several colleagues that he was very good and we were a little sad that he had not stayed… we had no idea where he was going to get ”.
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