France's Kylian Mbappé, the Real Madrid star, has hit back at accusations of selfishness levelled at him during his Paris Saint-Germain days and since his switch to Los Blancos.
Asked in his interview with the French newspaper "L'Équipe" whether the great goalscorer always leans towards individualism, Mbappé replied: "All players are selfish, from the goalkeeper to the out-and-out striker. It is not disrespectful to say that sometimes we do not care much about certain positions. The out-and-out striker is always in the spotlight, and he has to take the limelight, sometimes deservedly and sometimes undeservedly."
He added: "I have scored goals in matches where other players were better than me, but in football, scoring is the hardest and most valuable part, and that is why it is natural to reap the glory sometimes and to face the opposite at other times."
Has his love for football changed? The French striker was clear: "No, I know how to separate the game from the business. The love for the game will never disappear, I fell in love with this game. And when I retire from football, I will continue to watch matches and go to the stadium, but perhaps I will no longer have any connection to the world of football after that. With experience, you learn to separate things and not to generalise, because generalising is a mistake. The game is what moves a huge number of people, and we should never lose that, for this is the essence of our work."
On the difference in "ego" between Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, Mbappé said: "Every dressing room contains this type of person, even those that have no stars. In my final year in Paris, apart from myself, there was no star, Ousmane Dembélé truly became a star afterwards. People always link the ego to the stars, yet I have seen players whom no one asks for a photo or an autograph and who have a huge ego. Many people have an ego, and not only players, but also people we do not see, who work in the offices."
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