Tommy Martin: Henry, Mbappe and the desperate fumble to find reverse
KILLER LINES: Presenters Kate Scott and Thierry Henry at the Ballon D'Or Ceremony in London. 'Please, people out there, relax, relax,' the French man insisted. Pic: Jeff Spicer, UEFA via Getty Images
In this week’s unsuccessful career change news, Thierry Henry’s hopes of becoming a high-end comedy compère look dead in the water.
That’s after he felt obliged to “clarify” some of the gags he delivered while hosting Monday night’s Ballon D’Or proceedings in London.
Henry and co-presenter Kate Scott had been hired to bring some of the screwball badinage of their US Champions League TV coverage for CBS to the stilted environs of football’s top awards ceremony.
But every comic gets a tough crowd now and then and for Thierry, that tough crowd was the entire internet. Henry was battered online for correcting Scott’s pronunciation of the titular Brazilian legend before the presentation of the Socrates award; for teasing Lamine Yamal about winning his third straight award for young men’s talent, asking him, 'is it the one you really wanted to win?'; and for declaring to overall Ballon D’Or winner Harry Kane that he thought Kylian Mbappé should have won.
Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, it ain’t. But poor old Thierry fell flat in his bid to cut across the Ballon D’Or’s strict code of snivelling obsequiousness, mainly because of the difficulties of landing edgy material with a multi-lingual, international audience and also because he’s not very funny and comes across as an arrogant French twat.
Unlike the late, great Canadian comedian Norm MacDonald, who, after he bombed at a stand-up gig, would wait in the hallway by the exit and shake the hand of every person as they left, Henry took to social media to push back at the haters.
He claimed that Scott was in on the Socrates gag, that he was a big fan of Yamal and was not “checking his ego at all” and that people should “relax” about him backing his countryman Mbappé for the big award.
"So please, people out there, relax, relax,” Henry concluded, “I love Harry Kane, I love Lamine Yamal and I didn't disrespect Kate. She was on the joke with me."
Now, I always find that jokes just get funnier and funnier when you have to explain them at length after the fact, so hopefully the supplementary background information will help Henry land future gigs as roaster-in-chief of the professional soccer elite.
Henry’s dabble with comedy death is a reminder of the highly stratified world of delicate ego that the football’s Ballon D’Or zone represents.
Indeed, the award itself has become a reflection of how the showbusiness has increasingly detached itself from the football business, to the point where there is this separate and incredibly lucrative industry wrapped up in buffing the image of a handful of untouchable individuals.
Picking up the Ballon D’Or makes you a ‘made man’ in this realm of the game, which is why the likes of Mbappé and Yamal campaigned so desperately to win this season’s award. Like the Sicilian mobsters who coined the phrase, any sign of disrespect is to be taken with grave offence, hence Henry’s London trainwreck.
All this is a hangover from the Messi and Ronaldo era at Barcelona and Real Madrid, when the prevailing atmosphere of an underground cock fight between the two clubs meant that any suggestion by any employee of either club that their star was not the greatest thing since sliced chorizo was punishable by death.
The two men’s generational brilliance turbocharged the Ballon D’Or from an afterthought to an arms race, the ludicrous pinnacle of the process coming when Vinicius Junior got snubbed for the award in 2024 at the expense of Rodri, precipitating an epic, all-out strop on the part of the player, his entourage and the entire Real Madrid organisation.
But the mobsters will tell you that there’s always someone further up the chain of command and when it comes to professional soccer’s highly stratified ladder of respect, things are no different.
It was Kylian Mbappé who learned this lesson when he managed to diss, not a club or international rival, but the entire 1.4 billion population of the People’s Republic of China.
After scoring both goals in his team’s El Clasico win over Barcelona at the weekend, Mbappé’s week took a distinct turn for the worse when a clip of him making a joke about Chairman Mao provoked massive controversy in China, where the player is a huge star.
In the clip, Mbappé is, ironically, talking in general about the perception of him as ruling whatever dressing room he inhabits by force of his massive ego, and in particular one online meme that depicts him in the distinctive revolutionary garb of Mao.
“That makes me laugh the most, it’s the one where there’s a video of a guy, I think it’s a Chinese dictator,” went the offending comment.
To be fair to Mbappé, Mao did do his fair share of dictating in his day.
Nonetheless, the remark did not go down well when circulated in China, where Mao remains a revered figure five decades after his death and where the state tends to brush over the millions who died during his time as ruler in such fun escapades as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
One by one, a slew of Chinese companies withdrew lucrative endorsement deals with Mbappé while state television suspended coverage of La Liga. Social media site Weibo was awash with criticism of Mbappé, even though strict censorship controls meant few had actually seen the clip in question.
A Chinese foreign ministry statement said, "Words and actions that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people will naturally be met with joint opposition from all sectors of Chinese society."
All of which has provoked panic in the Mbappé, Real Madrid and La Liga camps, which have rushed to issue grovelling apologies to the great mass of the Chinese people. “I apologise to everyone my words have upset,” went Mbappé’s statement. “This was absolutely not my intention. I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history, and I am sincerely sorry.”
Real came out with their own apology, while La Liga president Javier Tebas even arranged a meeting with the Chinese ambassador to Spain to smooth out the row.
Of course, Mbappé and co have not suddenly been gripped by a heartfelt sense of respect for Chinese culture, but rather a sudden terror at the prospect of losing a market which represents up to 15 per cent of Real’s merchandise sales, in a country with a reported 97 million who claim to be fans of the Spanish giants.
A pickle indeed, but it has been hilarious to watch the uber-sensitive, status-obsessed world of elite soccer, as exemplified by Mbappé and Real, grovelling on its knees after falling foul of a rule they should know well: don’t disrespect the boss.
Thierry will have great material for his next gig.
