An exclusive interview with Abdoulaye Doucoure headlines a bumper matchday programme for Everton’s Premier League visit of Brentford on Saturday.
The Blues midfielder opens up on his upbringing in the suburbs of Paris and how that shaped him into the footballer he is today, as well as his resurgence under new manager Sean Dyche and his hopes for the future.
The extract below is from Saturday's matchday programme, priced £4, which can be purchase around the ground or click here to order online now.
Doucoure, who played as a striker himself during his early years, has always been obsessed. Indeed, he says, being a footballer, “has been my dream for as long as I’ve known football”.
Growing up in Les Mureaux, located in the north-western suburbs of Paris, Doucoure was the second youngest of eight children. His Malian mother and father — Binta and Mamadou — had made the move to France in the early 1980s before they began a family.
Mamadou was an engineer for automobile giants Renault, a job that initially brought him to Europe, while Binta stayed home to look after their large family.
Abdoulaye, meanwhile, has only happy memories of his childhood, many of which were spent playing football on the streets. Les Mureaux is a cultural melting pot with a large immigrant population. Teams for impromptu games were often split by kids of different nationalities, other times different communes of the French capital would be pitted against one another.
However the teams were selected, the foundations of Doucoure’s abilities were being built.
“There were lots of people like me there — people whose parents work hard so the kids hang around in the streets playing football,” he explains. “Everyone wanted to play football all of the time and that’s what we’d do.
“There were quite a lot of different nationalities and quite often that’s how we would decide on teams. So the Malian guys like me would play our friends from Senegal and things like that. It was always fun and it’s funny looking back now that’s how we did it.
“The games would usually be between guys of similar ages but I loved getting to play with the older kids. I got to do that sometimes because I was quite good and they would call me to play with them.
“There was the odd cage you could play in but most of the time it was just out on the streets. We would create goals ourselves. I remember finding bits of wood that we would use to create goalposts ourselves.
“It was tough football. There was an emphasis on dribbling. I was a striker back then and I loved to dribble, run, score lots of goals.
“They were great times, great memories.”
Paris and its circumambient areas have long been a hotbed of footballing talent.
Despite a modest population of around 10,000 people, Doucoure’s birthplace — Meulan-en-Yvelines — has also produced the likes of Real Madrid and France defender Ferland Mendy and former AC Milan forward M’Baye Niang, a close friend of Doucoure’s today having first met and played together in high school.
“It’s hard to say why [so many professional footballers come from around Paris],” he ponders. “All I can say from my experience is that football is what everyone loves.
“There’s a lot of talent there and everywhere you go kids were playing football.”
Elsewhere in the matchday read, we catch up with in-form winger Dwight McNeil about life as an Everton player and the similarities and difference of life under Dyche compared to the pair's spell together at Burnley.
There is also an in-depth former player interview with former Everton youngster, Conor Grant, who talks about his upbringing with the Club he loves and "finding a football home" with Plymouth Argyle.
