From a Canal+ shoot in 2017 to a Los Angeles production company — how a documentary director earned the rarest commodity in football: Mbappé’s unconditional trust.
A Relationship Built Before the Explosion
Most people discovered Kylian Mbappé in the summer of 2017, when his Champions League performances at Monaco left Europe speechless. Antoine Le Roy got there first.
In January 2017 — months before the global explosion — Le Roy, then working for Canal+, approached the Mbappé family with a simple proposal: let me film your son’s story. The family said yes. That decision would define both careers.
The resulting documentary, an Intérieur Sport episode simply titled “Kylian”, aired in 2018 and remains one of the most intimate portraits of the player ever produced. Le Roy had followed Mbappé for over a year: through the Monaco breakthrough, the Ligue 1 title, and the seismic transfer to Paris Saint-Germain that made him the second most expensive player in football history.
Getting that access wasn’t luck. It was trust, built slowly and deliberately.
More Than a Filmmaker: The Inner Circle
In the tightly controlled world of elite football, Mbappé’s inner circle is famously small and fiercely protective. Le Roy is in it — not just professionally, but personally.
The two regularly play NBA 2K together online, part of the tight-knit gaming group that surrounds the superstar. At some point during a PSG match, Mbappé scored and celebrated with a basketball-style gesture — a “private joke” directed specifically at Le Roy, a nod to their virtual court battles. It’s the kind of detail that tells you everything about the nature of their relationship.
This is not a hired hand. This is a friend with a camera.
Zebra Valley: The Business Partnership
The friendship has since formalized into a business structure. Le Roy now works as director and producer for Zebra Valley, Mbappé’s own production company headquartered in Los Angeles — a strategic choice of city that signals the player’s long-term ambitions far beyond European football.
Le Roy’s most significant assignment to date: following Mbappé through what may be the most dramatic chapter of his career. His cameras were rolling during the turbulent final season at PSG — the public fallout, the contract stand-off, the cold war with club management — and then through the historic arrival at Real Madrid in the summer of 2024.
The footage exists. The question is whether anyone will ever see it.
The Documentary That May Never Exist
Here lies the central paradox of Le Roy’s work with Mbappé.
Despite months of filming across two of the biggest stories in world football, there is a real possibility this documentary never gets released. Mbappé has always maintained a carefully constructed public image, and he has been historically reluctant to let cameras penetrate too deep. His own words explain the hesitation: he fears people would know “where he sleeps and what he eats” — a loss of control over his private self that no contract figure can compensate for.
The Zebra Valley documentary sits in a vault somewhere in Los Angeles, complete or near-complete, waiting for a green light that may never come.
For now, Antoine Le Roy remains what he has always been to Kylian Mbappé: a trusted confidant, a fierce gaming rival, and the designated storyteller of a generational icon — whether or not the world ever gets to see the story he filmed.
About the author
Victor Blanc
Football Business Correspondent at Mbappé Live. Covers contracts, sponsorships, investment strategy, and the financial architecture behind elite sport.
