THE NETWORK
Jires Kembo Ekoko was adopted by Wilfrid Mbappe and Fayza Lamari at age 11. He attended Clairefontaine, played Ligue 1 for Stade Rennais, and was exactly ten years older than Kylian. His career was the family’s beta test — the trial run that taught Wilfrid and Fayza every trap in professional football contracts before Kylian’s talent attracted the world’s biggest clubs. The holding company that would eventually become Interconnected Ventures was originally named KEWJF: Kylian, Ethan, Wilfrid, Jires, Fayza. He was written into the corporate structure from the start.
From Kinshasa to Bondy — how Jires entered the family
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jires Kembo Ekoko was taken in by the Mbappe family when he was 11 years old. He arrived in Bondy a decade before Kylian was born, which means Kylian has no memory of a household without him. As Kylian himself put it: he was not born when Jires entered the family, so for him, Jires was always there. The framing matters. In the origin story of the Mbappe empire, Jires is not a footnote. He is the first chapter.
The professional career that educated the family
Jires attended INF Clairefontaine — the same national academy Kylian would later pass through — and made his professional career as a forward, primarily at Stade Rennais in Ligue 1. His career spanned more than a decade across multiple French clubs. It was not a superstar career. It was something more useful to the family: a functional education in how the professional football industry actually operates at close range.
Wilfrid and Fayza navigated agent relationships, contract negotiations, and professional club dynamics while managing Jires’s career. By the time Kylian’s talent became undeniable and Monaco came calling, the family already knew what they were doing. They had made the mistakes — or watched others make them — and built the framework that would eventually produce the most financially sophisticated player contract in football history. The Real Madrid deal structure — zero transfer fee, €150M signing bonus, 80% image rights retained — did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a family that had spent a decade learning the industry.
The technical legacy: the feinte de frappe
Among the more specific inheritances: Kylian’s signature fake shot — the feinte de frappe — is a move he learned by watching Jires. As Jires has explained it, the move passed from Wilfrid to him, and then from him to Kylian, who watched his older brother play for the French Under-21 national team and absorbed it. The move that has beaten elite defenders across three World Cups originated in a living room in Bondy. Jires was also the first to identify Kylian’s potential to his professional teammates at Rennes, long before any scout or club had understood what they were looking at.
KEWJF: the holding company that named him
In 2017, the family established a holding company to manage Kylian’s commercial rights. They named it KEWJF: Kylian, Ethan, Wilfrid, Jires, Fayza. The corporate structure has since evolved into Interconnected Ventures — the entity through which Coalition Capital operates — but the original naming decision is a permanent record of how the family understood its own architecture. Jires was not an informal presence tolerated at the margins. He was written into the legal entity at the point of founding. In a network designed entirely around function, that inclusion is a deliberate statement.
For the full map of the Mbappe inner circle and how each member relates to the commercial structure, see Inside the Fortress.
— Victor Blanc, Football Business Correspondent
Deepen Your Intelligence
- Wilfrid Mbappé: The Coach Who Produced 20 Professional Footballers
- Fayza Lamari: The Agent-Mother Who Built the Mbappe Business Empire
- Ethan Mbappe: The Younger Brother Who Chose His Own Path
- Coalition Capital: The Architecture of Mbappé’s Investment Empire
- Inside the Fortress: The Complete Map of the Mbappe Network
- Mbappe’s Real Madrid Contract: €150M Bonus, 80% Image Rights
About the author
Victor Blanc
Football Business Correspondent at Mbappé Live. Covers contracts, sponsorships, investment strategy, and the financial architecture behind elite sport.
