Kylian Mbappe and Thomas Tuchel, MIA. Plus: A failed attempt to transform soccer

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Hello! Kylian Mbappe, Thomas Tuchel — where you at?

Mbappe mystery

Why did Deschamps leave his captain out of the France squad?

Kylian Mbappe’s first absence from the France squad this season barely rippled the water around him. Mbappe had an underlying thigh strain. The slightest limp has players backing out of regular international call-ups. The concern was real and for Real Madrid, pushing his luck had no upside.

That was early October and of passing interest at best but Mbappe missing a second successive France roster, the one chosen by Didier Deschamps for Nations League games against Israel tonight and Italy on Sunday, was not going to pass without generating curiosity. And it hasn’t.

This time, Mbappe is fit, or fit enough to be ploughing through Real’s domestic calendar. According to France head coach Deschamps, the 25-year-old asked to join up. “Kylian wanted to come,” he said, taking responsibility for deciding otherwise without explaining why. Deschamps was adamant “non-sporting reasons” did not come into it.

That phrase was an apparent reference to what happened when Mbappe played no part in France’s October matches. He went to Sweden with friends and family instead and at the end of that trip, reports in the Swedish media linked him to a police investigation into an alleged rape in a hotel where Mbappe had been staying.

A lawyer representing Mbappe responded by saying the forward had “nothing to be reproached for”, and a statement from Mbappe’s camp hit out at “unfounded insinuations”. There have been no further developments since last month.

Rather than being crystal clear, Deschamps did that thing of answering questions about Mbappe in a way that prompted more. “I’m not going to enter into a reasoning that leads to interpretations,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you more.” So that’s where we stand — with only the certainty that Mbappe won’t remember his first six months with Real as the time of his life.

Thomas too cool?

FA CEO Mark Bullingham and Thomas Tuchel (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

Incoming England manager is not attending this week’s matches

More exciting times for England, you’d think, with a new head coach on the scene. Except Thomas Tuchel will have zero involvement in either of their Nations League fixtures against Greece or the Republic of Ireland. He won’t even travel to Athens or Wembley to watch them.

Perhaps he’s got the right idea. Withdrawals are close to double figures — Bukayo Saka and Cole Palmer among them — though it’s hard to believe the casualty count would be quite so high had Tuchel been there to impress. Harry Kane isn’t happy with all the call-offs. Furthermore, Tuchel’s assistant, Anthony Barry, is still wrapping up his duties with Portugal’s national team.

But I’m with Jack Pitt-Brooke: it’s peculiar that Tuchel isn’t firing straight into the job, like Mauricio Pochettino, whose USMNT face Jamaica this evening. If, as the Football Association says, the aim is to win the 2026 World Cup, Tuchel will have a finite number of international windows to work in before it arrives. Time is of the essence.

The German starts on January 1 and the logic, from his perspective, is to have “a clean start”. He’s a proven coach and he’ll have his own roadmap but, truthfully, the person who sounded most in need of a clean start after the last batch of games was interim head coach Lee Carsley.

The days ahead are Carsley’s last hurrah. Let’s see if he goes out with a whimper or a bang.

Catch a match 📺

(Selected games, ET/UK time)

UEFA Nations League (all 2.45pm/7.45pm):
Group A2: Belgium vs Italy — Fubo, ViX/Viaplay; France vs Israel — Fox Sports Plus, Fubo/Viaplay.
Group B2: Greece vs England — Fox Sports 1, Fubo/ITV.

CONMEBOL World Cup qualifiers:
Venezuela vs Brazil, 4pm/9pm; Paraguay vs Argentina, 6.30pm/11.30pm — both Fanatiz PPV.

CONCACAF Nations League quarter-finals:
Jamaica vs USMNT, 8pm/1am — Peacock Premium, Fubo.

News round-up 🗞️

Premier League referee David Coote (Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images)

Bentancur’s ban

(Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)

For a couple of months now, Tottenham Hotspur have been waiting for the outcome of an FA charge brought against midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur over comments he made about Spurs team-mate Son Heung-min.

Bentancur (above left with Son) incurred FA action after he remarked in jest that Son — a South Korea international — and his cousins “all look the same” during a TV interview in his home country of Uruguay. The 27-year-old rapidly issued an apology, which Son accepted.

No punishment for Bentancur had been confirmed, but The Athletic has been told that Spurs are resigned to him receiving a lengthy suspension. Discriminatory rhetoric can lead to a ban of up to 12 matches, such is the FA’s dim view of it.

Losing Bentancur is an impending blow for Spurs, whose early season form has been mixed, but a hard hit sends the right message. Racism towards South East Asian players is getting worse. The data proves it. And while Son did not seem keen for Bentancur to be punished, zero tolerance has to mean that.

Kean to kick on

It feels as if Moise Kean has been around forever. In football terms, he almost has. He was 16 when he debuted for Juventus, fully eight years ago.

Kean, for a while, was spoken about as generational talent but a gauge of how much his career has meandered is how the hat-trick he scored for Fiorentina against Hellas Verona on Sunday was the very first of his career. He rounded it off with the fine effort below but we’re not talking about a boy anymore. He’ll turn 25 in a few months.

📂 3/3 pic.twitter.com/N7NkdSGzlm

— Lega Serie A (@SerieA) November 11, 2024

This James Horncastle interview with him, however, implies that Kean has found momentum and direction like never before. He’s in the mix with the Italy team. He has scored eight Serie A goals (only Atalanta’s Mateo Retegui has more) to help drill Fiorentina into the top three. “Florence, as a city, believes in me,” he said, and you can’t help thinking belief is the key to it.

By the time he was 20, Kean had been at Juve, Everton and Paris Saint-Germain, where he spent time with Mbappe. He fizzed in fits and starts but couldn’t fully catch fire.

A new sense of purpose can give him confidence that he was merely a late bloomer, waiting to find the right home.

America’s League One 🇺🇸

(Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

Those of us who were alive and kicking in the 1990s (particularly in the UK) will recall a certain brand of lager promoting itself as a Premier League sponsor by latching onto the idea that the United States did not get or understand football.

If the advert was funny then, it looks like a trope today. But we can probably all agree that Jim Paglia’s League 1 America project — a ’90s scheme and one of the many attempts to develop professional soccer in the U.S. before Major League Soccer (MLS) nailed it — was way, way out there.

Paglia, a businessman in the Chicago area, formulated his League 1 America blueprint using the principles of U.S. sport — bigger scorelines, less open play — because, in his words, “professional soccer is simply not viable as an end until itself”.

The nuts and bolts of it make for a great read: players’ kit fitted with microchips to make lights and buzzers go off around the pitch, defenders earning more points for goals than attackers, four goals to shoot at and so on. I chuckled to read that, at a pilot of it, spectators were challenged to time how long it took them to work out what the hell was going on.

League 1 America got as far as FIFA’s front door. The remnants of it, sadly, reside in Paglia’s loft. We’ll chalk it down as a brave effort that didn’t see the light of day.

Around The Athletic FC 🔄

Roberto Olabe, a man in demand (Real Sociedad TV)

(Top photo: Christian Liewig – Corbis/Getty Images)