Camavinga: ‘People think Madrid are dead, but Madrid are never dead’

Camavinga was the youngest footballer to play for Rennes, at 16 years four months, the youngest to make his debut for France since the second world war, aged 17

SPECIAL TALENT: Real Madrid's French midfielder Eduardo Camavinga. Pic: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

“My dad told me I was the one who was going to lift the family up,” Eduardo Camavinga says. He was 11 then; he is 20 now and he is smiling. He is always smiling.

He was in the fifth year at school and can picture the fire engines going past. Born in a refugee camp in Miconge, Angola, to Congolese parents, the third of six children, he was a toddler when they moved to France: first Lille, then Fougères, a pretty little town of 20,000 in Brittany where they made a home. That day, it burned down. They had been in it a year.