The country’s new football hero has given pride and a positive image to the urban ghetto where he was raised

Beneath grey apartment buildings in the poor suburb of Bondy, north-east of Paris, there was a familiar sound of summer afternoons: the thud of a football against concrete as children played kickabout in potholed courtyards.

But the French flags hanging from car windows, the banner supporting the French football team on a street corner, and children proudly wearing France football shirts showed a new sense of excitement. “Kylian Mbappé for president,” shouted a 10-year-old with a ball.

It was here in Bondy that Mbappé, the 19-year-old French hero of the World Cup, was born, raised and played his first games.

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As France prepares to face Croatia in the final, the hero-worship of Mbappé has turned a positive spotlight on Paris’s poor banlieues. Several star players grew up in the capital’s outskirts, including N’Golo Kanté and Paul Pogba. The outpouring of pride is a welcome change for the ethnically diverse areas which, more than a decade after the 2005 riots, are still so stigmatised and discriminated against that one politician warned this year of “a new apartheid”.

French politics has traditionally placed extraordinary pressure on the national football team to be a standard bearer for the country’s identity and a magic fix for society’s ills. It is now seen as political folly to have expected Zinedine Zidane’s ethnically diverse 1998 World Cup winning team – mythologised as “Black-Blanc-Beur” (Black-White-Arab) – to have solved France’s deep-seated identity problems 20 years ago simply by winning a tournament.

Four years after the 1998 “rainbow” team was held up as a balm for race relations, the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen – who complained of too many black people in the French football squad – made it to the final round of the 2002 presidential election. In last year’s presidential election his daughter, Marine Le Pen, won more than 10 million votes, the best ever result for the Front National, now the Rassemblement National.

But the fact that during this World Cup Mbappé has been hailed as a national hero of diversity is seen as a reflection of a changing France and growing banlieue talent, a move to bridge the divide between the capital and its hinterlands. Sylvine Thomassin, the mayor of Bondy, lauded the fact that the tournament has brought “a good image of the banlieue in general”.

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At a Bondy youth club, teenagers were preparing red, white and blue banners and stockpiling flags for the town’s screening of the final. “The World Cup has brought such a positive feeling here, it’s magic,” said Kamelia, 15, who played women’s football at AS Bondy, the small local club where Mbappé trained as a child. “There’s a real feeling of solidarity – whole families will be gathering to watch the match.”

Ayoub, 16, another young local player, remembered Mbappé as a child. “He was always out there doing extra practice. He’s our mascot. He’s proof that, if you work hard enough, everything is possible.”

In the town centre a vast banner hung from the roof of the town hall saying: “Thank you Kylian.”

There has been such an increase in leading French football players from the Paris banlieue in the past two decades that the area around the French capital is now seen as perhaps the world’s biggest talent pool of budding footballers, ahead of São Paulo in Brazil. There are many reasons: excellent local clubs, a high concentration of a young population and the large numbers of talent scouts who flock here. Even the style of some of the players is said to reflect a childhood of street football where many learn to play fast in small spaces.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police at the scene of a shooting in Bondy, north-east Paris, where French striker Kylian Mbappé grew up. Photograph: Le Parisien

Bondy, where Mbappé grew up, has a population of about 50,000, extending either side of a motorway linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport. It is part of the département of Seine-Saint-Denis which, with 1.6 million people, is the poorest area in France, with the youngest population. It was in Seine-Saint-Denis that three weeks of riots across French cities began in 2005, after two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were on their way home from football, were electrocuted while hiding in an electricity substation after they were chased by police.

Unemployment and poverty on the estates north of Paris is still higher than elsewhere in France, and many young people remain marginalised and jobless because of their address, skin colour or their parents’ immigrant roots. President Emmanuel Macron once described the discrimination and inequality here as a kind of “house arrest”.

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But Mbappé and his family tell another story of the banlieue – young talent, ambition and family support – which France has been keen to embrace this summer. If the young star began singing the national anthem and dreaming of playing for France before the age of five, much is due to his parents. His father Wilfried, who has Cameroonian roots, was a local football player and a respected coach in Bondy. His mother, Fayza, of Algerian origin, was a professional handball player. They still advise their son, who has been praised for giving his World Cup match fees to charity and he has said he would be lost without them.

“Wilfried Mbappé was a coach and youth worker while I was growing up, he always gave everything for the community; if it wasn’t for him, I might not be where I am today,” said Hakim Ziane, a teacher and youth worker. “It’s wonderful that the banlieue is being celebrated today rather than stigmatised. There are no barriers in this town. There is a lot of talent and we need to do what we can to make sure social mobility works.”

Of the 23 players in the young French squad, more than half are of African or Arab descent, drawing comparisons with the 1998 squad. France’s place in the World Cup final is already being hailed as a kind of unifying balm. Two sociologists called the final a kind of “collective therapy” after years of terrorist attacks that have fractured an already riven French society.

But in a French republic that is in theory supposed to be colour-blind, issues of race and identity in the national team have not been easy in the past decade.

In 2010 the team’s mutiny at the World Cup in South Africa was privately blamed by some on black or Muslim players, including the French convert to Islam, Franck Ribéry. Speculation was that the team had fragmented over a lack of “national identity”, which angered supporters in the banlieues. In 2011 French football was mired in crisis after claims that officials tried to limit black and Arab players on youth training schemes to make the team more white. The novelist Olivier Guez, who flew with Macron to watch the semi-final in Russia, warned last week against burdening the team with too much symbolism about “the nation”.

But in Bondy the positive mood is welcome. “Everyone is so proud and happy, it has been amazing,” said Shaïma Outouia, 21, a youth worker and sports coach who knew Mbappé. “It’s great to show Bondy in a positive light, as a place that does everything to help its young and old. On TV, Kylian rightly looks serious, but I know him as someone fun, generous, always making people laugh.”