Lionel Messi joined Kylian Mbappe this week as a football club owner, but as the Real Madrid striker has shown, getting success in the boardroom can be as challenging as realising it on the field.
It’s not been a good week for Mbappe. While he hit a personal milestone of scoring his 15th Champions League goal of the season, his Real Madrid side crashed out of the Champions League at the hands of Bayern Munich and face the distinct possibility of failing to win a title for the second successive season.
Meanwhile, his camp has been forced to acknowledge that the ownership project of Caen has stalled this season.
This comes as a timely reminder to Messi, who on Thursday announced that he will buy Spanish fifth-tier side UE Cornella, that achieving success off the field is a very different beast to doing so on the park.
Caen on the slide under Mbappe
Mbappe bought Caen via an 80% stake in Coalition Capital, his investment firm, when they were still in France’s second tier. At that point, they were one of the favourites to win promotion to Ligue 1. Instead, they were relegated.
Season two has gone little better. Caen have drawn 15 of their 28 matches and will finish in the middle of the standings. For the second year in succession, a managerial change was made over the winter break, but former Arsenal star and France international Gael Clichy, a three-time Premier League champion, has managed to oversee only two victories in the second half of the season.
The Mbappe clan has been backed into a corner and has been forced to admit things aren’t going according to plan, although they are adamant that these are still early days in the project.
“It’s clear that it’s not been up to scratch,” Mbappe’s mother Fayza Lamari admitted to Ouest France. “However, I still believe that when you build a house, you start with the foundations. We’re moving forward slowly and we’ll take stock at the end of the season. Of course, we’ll have to learn from this.
“Gael Clichy embodies our values as humans. I’m very happy he’s here. He represents human values, a culture of effort and hard work. I think we can already see the changes in training, not necessarily in matches yet, but that will come. We’re going to work as a team, and we hope to come back stronger next year.”
But it’s not all been negative. A restructured academy is set to begin when the new season begins, and it is hoped that will provide fresh impetus for the club, though clearly the impact on the first team will not be instant.
What can Messi learn from Mbappe?
Mbappe has so far failed to find the right people to steer Caen in the correct direction, and if Messi’s project at Cornella is to avoid faltering in a similar manner, he will have to have greater success in this realm.
Club-building needs delegation, expertise and time. So far, Mbappe has been unable to successfully find any of these three elements, and his reputation has taken a dent as a result.
The Real Madrid star appears to have bitten off more he can chew at Caen, which is a comparatively big club with a fanbase that still numbers around 10,000 on a weekly basis despite a disastrous season that has seen only four home wins.
In comparison, the pressure is off Messi. Cornella’s ground can hold only 1,500, underlining that he has bought a much smaller club.
In many ways, then, the two projects of these superstars are very different; Mbappe is seeking to lead a club to its former glory while Messi is seeking to build a team from the ground up. Yet the Argentine should look to the Real Madrid star and learn from his errors as his diversification away from the professional game accelerates.
