‘Legends are made through work and loyalty’: How Kylian Mbappe is ruining a football club. The story of SM Caen
It seems as if the great Kylian Mbappe has finally found elite form at his new club Real Madrid after, by his standards, was an unflattering beginning to his career at Los Blancos. With 8 goals in his last 6, including a first hattrick away to Ronaldo Nazario owned team Real Valladolid, and 22 goals in all competitions this season Mbappe is only going to improve this season. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it seems as if SM Caen – the team Mbappe has an 80% stake in, are only getting worse.
Many Caen fans will tell you that they have been patient with this team. Caen have been somewhat of a yoyo club throughout the years within the French pyramid, but after promotion in 2013/14 they became topflight mains stays for 5 seasons, finishing as high as 7th place. However, in the 2018/19 season the luck ran out and the club were relegated finishing second bottom.
Many of their loyal and large fanbase expected a swift return, but this wasn’t the case, and the club almost suffered a further plummet down to the National, saved only by a last-minute penalty on the final day of the season in 20/21. Since then, their fortunes have turned around, uncoincidentally aligning with the purchase of Guinea-Bissau international Alexandre Mendy. Now, I know what you’re thinking: who the f**k is that? Well, to Caen fans he is on a level above even Kylian Mbappe.
No seriously.
Despite never scoring above 4 league goals in a singular season as a striker, Caen picked him up on a free at the start of 20/21. And he actually started life in Caen the exact same, only amassing 4 league goals. But on the opening day of the 21/22 season, Mendy scored a hattrick in a 4-0 over Rodez meaning he’d already almost equalled his goal tally of the entirety of last season in just a singular game. And this game proved to be the turning point both for him and Caen. He finished the season with 16 league goals with Caen improving to 7th place.
The next season was even better, scoring 19 and picking up 5 assists, only being beaten in scoring by Georgian star Georges Mikautadze. Caen also progressed again, finishing 5th and narrowly missing out on a playoff spot to earn promotion back to the big time. Now what if told you that only 6 players in Europe scored more goals than Mendy in the year of 2023. That’s correct: Mendy was sandwiched between players such as Haaland, Lautaro, Salah and Osimhen, Of course, the level is much lower, but the feat is still impressive for a man who had never scored more than 4 league goals before turning 27. Now a player at the top of this list, 6 places ahead of Mendy was of course Kylian Mbappe. As previously mentioned, Mbappe bought an 80% stake in SM Caen last summer, which raised many eyebrows from fans in France. Aside from the pure insanity that a man who’s only 25 can outright buy a football team, it raised many legal questions:
What if Caen were to ever play Mbappe professionally? Would he be allowed to play? But the most important question I believe people should’ve been asking was: why? Seriously why did Mbappe feel the need to buy a team he has absolutely no connection with before he’s even retired? And surely a man who is fully focused on his career in Madrid cannot maintain a business as hectic and unpredictable a football club. Well as it happens, things are not going as planned. When Mbappe purchased the club in July, many Caen fans were excited. Coming off a 6th placed finish they felt it was the necessary step to bring them back to where they hadn’t been for going on 5 years. However, Caen now sit second from bottom, level on points with last place. They are also 7 game winless run and haven’t even won since a 2-0 against Bastia at the beginning of November. A run like this was unprecedented at the start of the season, and the anger towards Mbappe shown by the noisy fanbase has been evident. On the 3rd of January in a 0-1 home loss to Clermont a banner was held by the ultra-section reading: ‘Mbappe SMC is not your toy’. Another one read: ‘Before shining on the world stage, respect the local figures’ and finally: ‘Here, legends are made through work and loyalty’. It is clear that the relationship has soured, and the fanbase has rightly felt overlooked by the Frenchman.
A particularly bad moment was when Nicholas Seube was sacked just before the new year. This was a man who had joined Caen in 2001 as a player, retiring in 2017 after making a record amount of appearances. Seube later climbed through the managerial ranks at Caen eventually being handed the head coach role in November 2023. We are talking about an ultimate club legend here, one who was dismissed and discarded without dignity. And this is exactly where the problem lies. Of course, this decision was not made by Mbappe himself. And you wouldn’t expect him to, because he’s too busy playing football on the world stage. Instead, it is the ownership group that call the shots but that is a huge problem because both the ownership group team as well as Mbappe are so far disconnected from the club.
Mbappe bought Caen for monetary and status reasons, not because he actually cares or knows about the ins and outs of the club. It is very apparent that Mbappe did not know what he was getting himself into and as the Caen fans point out they are not some toy that you can mess around with. This is a football team with the second highest average attendance in Ligue 2, with a stadium capacity of over 20,000. A team founded over 110 years ago and a team that has meant everything to the local Norman identity. Football ownership is messy and often goes wrong because owners overlook the key facts such as this which will always eventually lead to mismanagement. And whilst Mbappe may lose some money with Caen’s inevitable relegation this season, the fans will lose so much more.
Overall, the investment was built on false promises and has already gone so wrong so quickly but it is both unclear and unlikely if Mbappe will choose to sell. The hope for the fans now is that the players will turn it around, but that has to be sooner rather than later. So far the club has only managed to bring in 3 players, only one of them on a permanent deal. A defender from the Cypriot league, midfielder from the Croatian league and a winger from the Polish league. These transfers all follow a pattern that don’t align with the custom. Most other windows Caen have shopped for players purely in the French market, so why the sudden change of approach? Is it linked with the new ownership? Who knows, but one thing for certain is that if these new players don’t hit the ground running the intensity of those banners and protests from the stands are only going to get higher. SM Caen, a club in crisis.
