Cyril Collot - Pogba, Mbappé, Griezmann

A small provincial town with just over 35,000 inhabitants, about 60 kilometres from Lyon, Mcon is somewhere not necessarily used to attention. From a sporting perspective, there have not been many champions to speak of, or at least no one like Antoine Griezmann, who was born there in 21 March 1991.

Alain Griezmann, his father, had been a municipal employee for a number of years, so the family Alain, Antoine, his mother Isabelle, his sister Maud and his younger brother Theo lived in a small detached home next to the Les Gautriats community centre. It was a working-class neighbourhood, bordered by large pine trees and wide-open green spaces.

Georges Brassens Primary School, an imposing building surrounded by a huge tarmac playground with faint markings for a football pitch, is located in the middle of the neighbourhood, on Rue de Normandie. At school, as he himself admits, Antoine was always at the back of the class, usually chatting: I was the kind of kid who would cut bits off my rubber to throw at my friends, and whenever my mother asked if I had any homework, funnily enough I never did!

He was a simple, likeable kid who never caused any trouble, remembers his former headmaster, Marc Cornaton. He was one of a group of boys and girls who played football at every break time. After school, it was football again. As he himself admits, Antoine had his routine at Les Gautriats, kicking the ball alone against the blue doors of the family garage, as well as playing in the basketball court below the house: Even when we went to visit my parents friends I had to take my ball with me. Above all, football was fun, a real passion. When youre ten years old, being a professional is just a dream, nothing more.

God had not blessed my brother Fassou with children. He was living in France and was 50, so he returned home to sacrifice a ram in the hope of finding fertility. This is what Kb, one of Fassou Antoine Pogbas sisters, told journalist Alban Traquet in March 2017. He then left again for Conakry in search of a romantic relationship.

This trip marked the starting point for the meeting between the Christian, Fassou Antoine and the future mother of Paul Pogba, a Muslim woman in her twenties named Yeo Moriba. Like her future husband, she was from Forested Guinea. Despite the age difference, the ram sacrifice was not in vain. Yeo Moriba gave birth to two beautiful boys, Florentin and Mathias, on 19 August 1990. The small family would spend two years in the port city of Conakry before leaving the Guinean capital to settle permanently in France.

The couple and their two children took possession of an apartment in the Le Bois-Briard development in a peaceful area to the north-east of Roissy-en-Brie, about 30 kilometres to the south-east of Paris. Just one year later, on 15 March 1993, Paul Labile Pogba came into the world at the maternity unit in Lagny-sur-Marne hospital.

When he was only two years old, Pauls parents decided to separate and Yeo Moriba moved a little further away to live in a modest uncluttered apartment in the neighbourhood known as La Renardire, where she brought up her three sons and two nieces on her own. I made a lot of sacrifices. I worked morning and night to support them, so they wouldnt be picked on by their schoolmates, would be happy and could go on holiday, she tells the journalists who come to interview her in her new well-to-do apartment in Bussy-Saint-Georges (about 30 kilometres from Roissy-en-Brie).

The boys were inseparable, and Paul was a real showman. He liked to dance, sing and play the clown. He soon christened himself La Pioche (The Pickaxe). There was an Ivorian actor in a TV series, Gohou Michel, who always said La Pioche, il va piocher le village [The Pickaxe, hes going to use his pickaxe in the village], Pogby La Pioche. I liked it so even my mother started calling me La Pioche, Paul said in 2016. Next came the turn of his two brothers: Florentin, the craziest, would be Le Zer. Mathias, who had a back like a gorilla, would be simply Le Dos (The Back). Le Zer, Le Dos and La Pioche soon carved out a reputation for themselves in the neighbourhood.

School? Pauls mother is uncompromising for the TV cameras: He was a total nightmare at school. He would tease his friends and the girls in his class because he was so high-spirited. Despite being a little embarrassed, Paul can only confirm: Its true, I was a real chatterbox. I couldnt keep still. I had ants in my pants.

Intelligent; lively; mischievous; a dreamer; nice; hyperactive; unruly; and difficult to manage: this is how some of his teachers describe Kylian Mbapp. He was a boy who couldnt sit still at his desk to listen to his teachers explanations. School was not his priority. Kylian had one idea in his head and that was becoming a professional footballer, says Jean-Franois Fanfan Suner, AS Bondy technical director and one of Kylians first coaches.

Born on 20 December 1998 and christened with the name Kylian Sanmi (short for Adesanmi, the crown fits me in Yoruba), he was the first child of Fayza Lottin and Wilfrid Mbapp, who lived on the second floor of a white building at number 4, Alle des Lilas, a five-storey 1950s council building in the centre of Bondy. Fayza 24 years old at the time and originally from Algeria grew up in Bondy Nord, in the Terre Saint Blaise neighbourhood. She played handball on the right wing for AS Bondy in Division 1 in the late 1990s and used to work as an instructor in the Maurice Petitjean and Blanqui neighbourhoods. Wilfrid, also an instructor, was 30 when he met Fayza; he was born in Douala in Cameroon and had come to France in search of a better life. First Bobigny, then Bondy, a suburb to the northeast of Paris, nine kilometres from the citys Porte de Pantin, where he worked and played football for years.