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PARIS. Kylian Mbappé’s party trip to Sweden has not gone unnoticed by the French media.
There is talk of the appropriateness of an officially injured world star taking the party flight from Madrid, at the same time as his national team mates are struggling in the Nations League.
But for Sweden, “Kyky’s” visit is a welcome recognition of one of our biggest export successes of all time.
When French people who are curious about Scandinavia ask me about Stockholm, I usually say: “Don’t go there before April and not after September and be prepared to overdraw the account.”
The long bright nights are one of Sweden’s best competitive advantages in the summer, which is why you should of course go there before Stockholm gets cold, as Orup had expressed it.
The news of Kylian Mbappé’s visit to the Swedish capital certainly cheered up the October rain. Colleagues in Paris started getting in touch in the middle of the week to check on it really true and what reasons Kyky might have had in that case.
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No wag culture in France
French news media are cautious, bordering on disinterested, when it comes to the private lives of soccer stars. There is no wag culture to speak of here. Unlike several Swedish high-profile players’ wives, their French sisters do not have podcasts where they share insights into everyday life with a soccer player. Did you know, for example, that N’Golo Kanté is married to Djibril Cissé’s ex-wife, 15 years older Jude Littler?
Anyway.
Kylian Mbappé has never appeared in public with a girlfriend, although of course the gossip magazines couldn’t help but speculate on the occasional romance over the years. Maybe that’s why it feels a little less awkward that a superstar flies into Stockholm in October and books up the VIP section of a nightclub where he invites around 30 people where “the majority are women”.
And hey, it’s hard not to get a little, what shall we say, proud by proxy?
The obvious winner of the 21st century
After all, Swedish girls got a special position in Europe from the 1960s when they holidayed carefree in the countries around the Mediterranean, while the politically and religiously strict Spaniards and Italians had to watch the spectacle from the kitchen or the church. Many years ago, during an evening out in Barcelona, a Spanish colleague handed me the book “La invasión de las suecas” – “The Invasion of the Swedes”. It is about Spain’s transformation from fascism to democracy that began with these kinds of outside influences. The Swedes took possession of the Solkusten “with their scandalous bikinis, their less strict morals and a radiance of freedom”, according to the book’s back text. (Unfortunately, I didn’t take it from the colleague in question because I felt mildly offended for some reason, which in turn is probably explained by the fact that I was still under thirty at the time and thus, by definition, humorless.)
The jokes, the dubious allusions and the legends about Swedish women have come to follow me in existence for over ten more years, but since the rest of Europe has thrown away its Catholic morality, we stand in the 21st century as the clear winners of history.
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full screen Photo: Jimmy Wixtröm
Of course Kykyn will have his way!
Incidentally, there is a rather funny episode of the American millennial sitcom Spin City when the mayor’s staff prepares him for a meeting with a Swedish delegation and ends up saying that the country’s best export product is “Swedish chicks”.
About fifteen years ago, before big football clubs wanted to “conquer the Asian market” or went to Doha to play pre-season in the owners’ backyard, Sweden was blessed with a number of high-octane training matches between the big European teams in August for no apparent reason. The buzz around the clubs was always that the players had expressed a desire to go to Sweden for no other reason than “Swedish chicks”.
In the last ten years, I feel that this Swedish competitive advantage has lost a little luster. To be sure, international superstars such as Mesut Özil, Kingsley Coman and Pernille Harder have married or engaged to Swedish women, but it has been a long time since someone gave Swedish women as a group more recognition than Kylian Mbappé did this week. Of course Kykyn will have his way!
The French superstar put his entire national team credo on the line to go to Sweden in October and party with Swedish women in the plural, despite the fact that he is not in the French squad because he is rehabilitating an injury (a somewhat strange story in itself ).
Hope it tasted good
Mbappé had now been given time off by Real Madrid and does not appear to have committed any foul play. But the French media are still asking the question why he sat and had dinner in Stockholm – at a French restaurant, however, which softens the impression that he does not care about his homeland – while Les Bleus ran out to the Bozsik Arena in Budapest to face Israel in the Nations League.
One has to hope, for Kylian Mbappé’s part and by all means for the Swedes present, that it tasted good.
