Thursday afternoon in sleepy Surrey and Tiémoué Bakayoko, sporting that shock of peroxide blond hair, is returning to his roots. The conversation has lingered on an insistence on wearing the No14 shirt both with Monaco and, since August, at Chelsea, with the justification taking him back to the crammed corner of Paris spanning Montparnasse, just inside the southern stretch of the Péripherique ring-road, which made him the man he is today.
“I’m from the 14th arrondissement, a difficult district, but being Parisian is a badge of honour for me,” he says. “I’m proud to be from there. Wearing 14 means all my neighbourhood is still with me. It’s a pressure I carry, but it’s important to show on the pitch where I come from.
“The values that are important to me – work, persistence, and enjoying myself – they all come from having grown up there. It’s not a particularly poor area but it is a district that’s difficult to escape. Paris produces good footballers. There were good footballers in my quartier, too, and I was one of
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At 23, Bakayoko is a France international and Ligue 1 champion, a £39.7m midfielder who has graced a Champions League semi-final and is establishing himself under Antonio Conte at the Premier League
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His journey even to this point has been far from straightforward. There have been setbacks, some self-inflicted courtesy of a mischievous sense of humour and, as he has acknowledged, a reluctance at times to concentrate at school. His reputation as hard work off the pitch at 13 had been partly responsible for a failure to earn a place at the illustrious Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine, the French Football Federation’s elite youth academy which recruits youngsters from across the Île-de-France region. A number of clubs, including his
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“Suffering an injury like that at that age … well, yes, there have been disappointments along the way,” he says. “The same with not getting into Clairefontaine. When you’re young and from Paris, the target is always to get into that academy. But there were other issues which stopped me getting in, and then the injury.” Stade Rennais offered a youth contract regardless of the break and it was in Brittany where Bakayoko, away from his family, found focus. Yannick Menu, then coach of the under-15s in the club’s respected academy, recognised a raw talent. “Yannick was the first coach I worked with when I arrived at Rennes, and always someone who backed me. He could help me when I was down or punish me when I needed to be punished, someone who told me honestly when I’d done well but also if I had performed poorly, identifying what I needed to work on. He was like a second father for me.”
Bakayoko earned a professional contract and replaced the departed Yann M’Vila in the first team, impressing under Philippe Montanier. Yet, one year into a three-year deal, Monaco paid £6m to lure him south to work under the recently appointed Leonardo Jardim. The 19-year-old was handed a debut on the opening day against Lorient in place of the club captain, Jérémy Toulalan, with the game duly lost and Bakayoko substituted, ignominiously, after 32 minutes. His reaction was furious. It would take months for his relationship with Jardim to heal. “I’m very much a different player now to what I was back then, but I wasn’t happy with being substituted that day. Not at all.
“When you are young and arrive from a small club like Rennes at a club like Monaco and you play your first match, and then the coach drags you off the pitch after 32
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“Yannick helped again. When things were difficult at Monaco he came to see me, analysed my game on video, identified what was wrong or missing, what I should be working on and what I needed to do. That third season at Monaco was the best of my career so far, and one I ended as a champion of France.”
A shift in attitude helped, an acknowledgement that, for all the perks of playing on the French Riviera, he was far from the finished article. He gave up the luxury villa and ditched the pink Porsche, rented an apartment and took up boxing classes and a strict diet. Then, in January 2016, Monaco appointed Claude Makelele – a player long idolised by Bakayoko’s brother, Abdoulaye, and now on Swansea City’s coaching staff – as technical director, with the former Chelsea midfielder making the 21-year-old’s development his pet project.
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