Collot / Caioli Martial Martial

The Making of Manchester United's New Teenage Superstar
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78578-137-7
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Luca Caioli

On 1 September 2015, Anthony Martial completed his transfer from Monaco to Manchester United. At just 19 years of age, the fee of £36m (potentially rising to £58m) made the France international the most expensive teenager of all time. Eyebrows were raised at the landmark fee but a goal against Liverpool in his first game helped get the supporters onside, while a number of key strikes in his debut season soon won over the critics as he became integral to Manchester United's attack. Renowned sports biographers Luca Caioli and Cyril Collot talk to coaches, teammates and even Martial himself, to provide an unrivalled behind-the-scenes look at the life of the teenage superstar.

Luca Caioli is the bestselling author of Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and Suarez. A renowned Italian sports journalist, he lives in Spain corresponding for SKY Italia and Corriere della Sera.|Cyril Collot is a French journalist. He was born in Lyon in 1973 and worked for Le Progrès, a regional paper, before starting his career in Euronews, the multilingual news television channel; he was appointed its Sports Editor in 1999. He is author of a several books about Olympique Lyonnais, and nowadays he works for the OLTV channel, where he has directed several documentaries about football.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collot, Cyril

Caioli, Luca

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Soaring towers

‘Why are the people who live in Les Ulis so surprised by the Bergères Towers? Why do they always ask why sixteen-storey buildings have been placed so close together when there is so much space around them?’ The answer offered by a welcome pamphlet distributed to new arrivals is simple: ‘The architects had no choice. They had to fit 10,000 homes on 200 hectares, not a handful of detached houses scattered across a park.’

Anthony Martial grew up in one of the soaring Bergères Towers, white, grey and pale coffee-coloured high-rise blocks that sprout up side by side in the centre of Les Ulis. We are twenty kilometres south east of Paris, in the département of Essonne, Île-de-France. On 17 February 2017, Les Ulis, caught between the A10 motorway and the 118 trunk road, will celebrate the first 40 years of its existence.

The story of Les Ulis began in 1960, when a ministerial decree authorised the urbanisation of an area between the towns of Bures-sur-Yvette and Orsay. It was intended to house employees, managers and researchers working for the Atomic Energy Commission, the large companies at the Courtabœuf business park, and the Université Paris Sud. In 1965, work started on the grassy fields used at that time for cultivating wheat, beetroot, strawberries and vegetables. France was experiencing a time of pronounced economic growth and improved living conditions during the period that would come to be known as the Trente Glorieuses. Robert Camelot, François Prieur and Georges-Henri Pingusson, the urban planners who designed Les Ulis, were inspired by the ideas of Le Corbusier: housing complexes, squares designed as terraces, internal streets for shops, and the separation of traffic flow, with walkways for pedestrians and streets for cars. It was a raised or elevated form of urban planning, an architecture of growth found in suburbs all over France. In 1968, the new development’s first inhabitants moved into the Bathes and Courdimanche districts, although some buildings were yet to have running water. Eight years later, on 14 March 1976, the citizens of Bures-sur-Yvette, Orsay and the new town were called upon to choose between three proposals in a referendum: maintaining the status quo, the current administrative situation at that time; opting for Bures-sur-Yvette and Orsay to be merged to encompass Les Ulis; or creating a new, third commune called Les Ulis. The winner, by a very slim margin, was the third option, and, on 17 February 1977, the 196th commune of Essonne, Les Ulis, officially came into existence. Once again, the welcome pamphlet explains that its name ‘comes from the Latin verb “uller”, which means “to burn”. The name of the town is derived from the ground on which stubble was burned to make fertiliser.’

In March 1977, Paul Loridant, a 28-year-old socialist, was elected mayor. His mandate would be renewed six times: he spent 31 years governing the town. The former Banque de France employee and one time senator for the Mouvement républicain et citoyen is now 68 and currently the deputy mayor in charge of finance and social affairs.

He remembers: ‘When I arrived, the town was a huge open-air construction site. There was still plenty of building to be done: the market, post office, town hall, the Boris Vian cultural centre, but there were already 20,000 inhabitants, people from all over France who came to work elsewhere in the region, or in Paris.’ Eighteen per cent of the inhabitants were back then, and still are, of foreign origin.

Portuguese, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa (Mauritania and Mali), Réunion and the Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique in particular). The population grew rapidly until 1982, when the inhabitants of Les Ulis reached almost 29,000, but this was followed by a slow demographic decline and consequent decay. Today, the municipality is home to barely 25,000. The percentage of young people living in the town has also fallen significantly. Why? According to Paul Loridant, the unresolved problem with Les Ulis is the integration and social evolution of a population of humble origins: ‘We have not been able to stop people leaving when their standard of living improves and they start climbing the social ladder. They prefer to move to neighbouring towns, such as Orsay or Limours, or closer to Paris, where they think they will have a better life, where society is more mixed. In Les Ulis, where we have more than 50 per cent social housing, those who leave are replaced by new immigrants.’

Not everyone agrees with this view. Many mention social problems, delinquency and crime. ‘This isn’t the Bronx,’ replies an indignant Benoît. ‘This is a quiet town. It’s nothing like some of the other towns around here. In 2005, during the banlieue riots, nothing happened here. There weren’t any clashes or raids.’

‘Difficult neighbourhoods? No, there aren’t any,’ confirms Yassine. ‘Everyone knows everyone here and we respect one another.’ We’re half an hour from Paris and we have plenty of advantages without any of the inconvenience. This is a cosmopolitan town that produces rappers and footballers, nothing else.’ But the local newspapers talk of drug trafficking, cannabis in particular. They say that Les Ulis has ended up on the liste rouge of problem towns and cities. They report incidents between youths and the police, as in the summers of 2009 and 2015. Paul Loridant admits: ‘Yes, there have been incidents, but never anything serious and certainly no more than in other cities in the Paris banlieue.’ As any good administrator would, the deputy mayor stresses the positive steps taken in terms of culture and infrastructure. He talks about kids from seriously underprivileged families in Les Ulis who have gone on to become university professors and leading researchers. Above all, he illustrates the current redevelopment, a genuine reconstruction to adapt the town to the demands of modern life. An ambitious project to revamp a style of urban planning that has failed to stand the test of time. A stroll around the city centre near the town hall, esplanade and market is all it takes to grasp that this is a place undergoing a transformation. Beneath the low-flying aircraft coming in to land on runways three and four at the nearby Paris Orly airport, they are working everywhere you look to change the face of Les Ulis. They are even re-cladding the towers. ‘That one there, at the bottom, near the park, the Tour Janvier, that’s where Anthony lived,’ says Jean Paul. He points to a sixteen-storey high-rise block like all the others, named after the months of the year and separated by gardens and leafless trees.

Born fifteen kilometres from here, in Massy, on 5 December 1995, Anthony is the third son of Florent and Myriam. His father comes from Le Gosier in Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe; he was born there in 1962. Florent came to metropolitan France at the age of twenty for his military service with the navy in Brest. After finishing his national service he stayed in France for two and a half years. It was then that he met Myriam, his future wife, who was also from Guadeloupe, from Petit-Bourg in Basse-Terre. Florent went back to Guadeloupe for six months but returned in 1985 to settle once and for all on the mainland. The couple married in 1986 and then moved to the Paris region. ‘We came to Les Ulis in 1988,’ remembers Florent Martial. ‘It was a young town, expanding towards Paris, near the motorways. I was working at the prefecture; my wife was working for a pharmaceutical company. Dorian, our first child, was born in 1989, followed by Johan in 1991 and then Anthony. We lived in Le Bosquet [another part of Les Ulis] and the kids all slept in the same room. Then, when Anthony was three, we moved into the Bergères Towers and they all had their own room. Of course, it was hectic at home with three boys. But they were good kids and they always felt understood. They were close as brothers. What was Anthony like? He didn’t like to be bothered. Whenever he looked at you out of the corner of his eye, that said it all. He was a bit reserved, he didn’t say much and he only smiled when he wanted to. He was very calm and collected.’

‘My brother has always had a strong character, perhaps the strongest of the three of us,’ explains Dorian, the eldest who now lives about thirty kilometres from Les Ulis and works as a technician on fire detection systems. ‘He was stubborn and there was trouble almost every day but that’s normal among brothers. Anthony is a kind person, although at school, in his own little world, he didn’t like to be annoyed.’

‘I met him at the École Primaire du Parc when we were six. We went to junior school together, then two or three years at secondary school. He was hyperactive in the classroom and a bit unruly. You could see that studying wasn’t for him. He was clever. He worked but didn’t want to spend hours with his nose in a book. He wanted to spend them with a football. I remember he was already very good when he was little. He was the only kid in Year 2 who played with the kids in Year 6. He would take free kicks like Roberto Carlos, with his left foot, even though he’s right-footed. Who were his idols? Ronaldo, the Brazilian Ronaldinho, and Zidane. He supported Olympique Lyonnais, the team that was winning everything in France back then. But he also liked Guardiola’s...