Another week, another son of a famous father who is thriving in the Bundesliga…
It’s the 93rd minute. It’s 1-1. It’s a cup quarter-final. You’re away, facing a team who haven’t lost a domestic cup match in half a decade. In front of whistling supporters, you skewed a penalty over the bar in the 61st minute. You’ve just been awarded another penalty.
21 years earlier, your father contested a semi-final on the other side of this glittering city. Just after half-time, he horribly misread his own team’s offside trap to let his opponents take the lead. Stung, he surged to the other end, bullied an opponent off the ball and, within a minute of the restart, had struck the first goal of his international career to level. Twenty-three minutes later, he curled in the last goal he would ever score for his country to seal the victory.
Your father is Lilian Thuram, the most capped player in French national team history. He was made a member of France’s Legion d’Honneur not long after that game. The sight of him strong-arming a Croatian forward into giving up possession seconds before full-time summed up the extent to which he had wrested control of that 1998 World Cup semi-final.
Modern footballers live such an exalted life that it’s often difficult to imagine what life would be like if we were in their boots. If we have any shared experiences at all, they are most likely to be found in childhood – the “rags to riches” trajectory of many professionals means that they remember what it was like to get public transport or go to the supermarket.
But with spells in Parma, Turin and Barcelona, Marcus’ childhood wasn’t ordinary. Born at the start of the season that would turn his father into a world champion, life as the son of a global star and French legend is all he’s known. When his father was playing for the Catalans, he was given a a pair of boots by one of his father’s teammates – Lionel Messi.
However, it’s long been clear that his talent (and that of his younger brother, Khéphren, who plays for Nice) merited attention despite, rather than because of, his illustrious parentage. A graduate of the footballing conveyor belt that is Clairefontaine, Thuram played for the French national age group sides at U15, U16, U17, U18, U19 and U20 levels. He went from rubbing shoulders with his father’s renowned teammates to playing against them – in 2018 he took the field in Ligue Un against Gianluigi Buffon, who had lined up alongside Lilian for nearly 10 years at Parma and Juventus.
In Germany, this talent has blossomed this season. Marcus’ exhilarating form, particularly before the Winterpause, spearheaded Borussia Mönchengladbach’s tilt at a first league title in over 40 years. The exciting forward scored 10 goals in all competitions prior to Christmas, as well as contributing 8 assists. Incredibly, he received the league’s ‘Rookie of the Month’ award in September, October and November. (Erling Haaland’s attempt at matching this has been put on hold by the German lockdown – after joining Dortmund in the mid-season break, he won the rookie award in January and February).
Arguably unlike his father, Marcus plays with a joie de vivre that has already made him a firm crowd favourite. His now routine victory celebration – removing a corner flag from the ground and hoisting his shirt (or that of the match’s outstanding performer) onto it – has taken root with Gladbach fans to the extent that it’s been the subject of lockdown memes in Germany.
Eligible to play for France, Italy and Guadeloupe, he seems destined to follow his father in playing a starring role for the national team. He has already won international silverware, lifting the 2016 UEFA U19 championship, although is still waiting for his chance to break into the world champions’ stellar senior squad.
And so back to that cup match: all-powerful Paris St Germain – complete with Neymar, Mbappé and Cavani – against unfancied Guingamp in January 2019. Given that I’ve based a whole piece on it, surely you’re not expecting young Marcus to miss?
It wasn’t the most convincing of strikes – goalkeeper Alphonse Areola, who appeared to have successfully unsettled Thuram before the earlier penalty, got a hand to it – but it went in. Guingamp, after a cup run almost impossibly littered with penalties – they were awarded three in this game, which was the only one of their five matches not to end in a shootout – went on to lose the final to Strasbourg.
But that sad ending was really a happy beginning for Thuram. The journey to the final, and particularly that last-minute penalty, propelled him into the spotlight, piqued Gladbach’s interest and has gone a long way to launching his career.
Gegenpress 