It was earlier in the summer that Kylian Mbappé launched his own Los Angeles-based production company called Zebra Valley, its remit to produce film and television projects based on a number of themes - football, of course, being one of them.
Among Le Parisien’s revelations in the last few days, in their reporting on the Aminata Diallo case, was that Mbappé's mother, Fayza Lamari, who looks after much of his business affairs, had talked with some of the head honchos at Paris Saint-Germain about Zebra Valley producing a documentary on Diallo’s life.
Le Parisien didn’t suggest as much, but considering the case to which the former French international’s story is habitually compared, you’d hardly be surprised if the working title was ‘I, Aminata’.
There was no shortage of interest in the project at the American end, by all accounts, this story making the one at the centre of ‘I, Tonya’ seem a bit humdrum. That, you’ll recall, was based on the life of figure skater Tonya Harding, with, needless to say, a particular focus on the 1994 attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan.
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The film cost just $11 million to make, but grossed $53 million, so the appetite Stateside for a similarly themed yarn would, no doubt, have been considerable.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that PSG were all that enthused by Lamari’s proposal, even if the last thing they’d want to do is upset Mbappé's Ma. Besides, $53 million is probably in or around what the folk running Qatar Sports Investments, PSG’s owners, spend on cufflinks. They are, after all, estimated to be worth around the £250 billion mark.
On top of that, the Diallo case has been a source of mortification for the club, and an unholy distraction from their efforts to unseat Lyon as France and Europe’s major power in the women’s game. They were highly unlikely to want to draw any further attention to it.
[ A brutal assault and a teammate’s arrest rock PSG’s women’s teamOpens in new window ]
Anyway, they cast Diallo adrift at the end of last season, opting not to extend her contract, so they would like to hope she is no longer their problem.
In response, Diallo hired the rather colourful lawyer Carlo Alberto Brusa, who has represented the likes of Zinedine Zidane, Didier Deschamps, Karim Benzema and Franck Ribéry in the past - with mixed results, although Benzema and Ribéry were cleared of charges of having sex with an underage prostitute, while Brusa also won Zidane €5,000 in damages from a comedian who described the former French captain as “a billboard with three neurones”.
Diallo threatened to sue, claiming that she had a verbal agreement with PSG over a contract extension, and so didn’t seek new employers. She has been without a club since being let go, and after last week’s events, is unlikely to find one any time soon.
On Friday evening, she was charged with aggravated assault in the utterly bizarre case involving her former PSG team-mate Kheira Hamraoui who, last November, was dragged from a car Diallo was driving and assaulted with iron bars by two masked men.
Initially - and this is a plot even too implausible for EastEnders - the theory was that Hamraoui was targeted by folk hired to ‘punish’ her for having an affair with Eric Abidal, Barcelona’s technical director, and former French international, when she had a spell with the club.
His wife Hayet promptly filed for divorce, her lawyer claiming that he had confessed to having an affair with Hamraoui, at which point Abidal took to Instagram to beg for forgiveness. “I deserve this humiliation …. #loveyoutothemoonandback.”
By then, it was all getting a little too weird. Even more so when a fresh theory was put about, that Diallo arranged the assault because Hamraoui was a rival for a place in the PSG midfield.
We’ve all been peeved in our time after losing our place in a line-up - looking at you, under-14 school table tennis team - but largely stopped short of arranging for iron-bar-wielding chaps to intervene.
Diallo denied any involvement in the affair, and was released without charge after questioning.
Hamraoui, meanwhile, had her suspicions about Diallo too, which made for a decidedly awkward situation for PSG, their solution to have the pair train separately while they awaited some resolution to the case.
Come this season, along with Diallo’s legal threat, they had to handle a complaint from Hamraoui, under contract until next year, who brought in lawyers to monitor her treatment by the club after she was separated from the squad and made to train alone.
By then, Gérard Prêcheur, who twice won the Champions League as coach of Lyon, must have been wondering what he’d got himself in to when he agreed to replace Didier Olle-Nicolle as PSG coach in August.
Olle-Nicolle left the club by ‘mutual agreement’ after allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards a 17-year-old member of his squad, charges he denied.
By now, PSG was in meltdown, psychologists brought in to speak with the players, several of them looking to leave the club, the atmosphere, one said, “toxic”.
Ahead of Wednesday night’s Champions League game against Sweden’s Häcken, Prêcheur struggled to hide his exasperation in his press conference when the bulk of the questions focussed on Diallo and Hamraoui.
The investigation into Diallo, meanwhile, according to Le Parisien, discovered that she had Googled how to break a kneecap in the days before the attack on Hamraoui, the police report they quoted suggesting she had suffered “a slow psychological drift that has become, so to speak, pathological”.
All the grimmer when you read about her background on The Athletic, her Senegalese-born parents in Grenoble, where her father is a street cleaner, largely dependent on her modest enough wages as a footballer.
“At the age of 13, her time at Lyon was prematurely cut short. A male player is alleged to have racially insulted Diallo regularly over a period of time, calling her “a monkey”, “thick” and “fat”, and Lyon received a complaint that she had threatened him when she finally retaliated. Lyon have declined to comment on the matter.”
Hamraoui would be entitled to ask if that excused what was done to her. Of course not.
But Zebra Valley might be wise to back off. This isn’t entertainment, it’s the grimmest of tales.
