Hugo Ekitike has a question about his former Paris Saint-Germain team-mate Warren Zaire-Emery.
“It’s for his parents,” says the Eintracht Frankfurt forward. “What did they put in his bottle and in his genes to make him so old and so young at the same time?”
Zaire-Emery is PSG’s youngest-ever player, assist-maker and goalscorer. At 17 years, eight months and 11 days, he was the youngest to represent France at senior level since 1914. For that call-up, France’s head coach Didier Deschamps had to ask his mum and dad to complete a written consent form under safeguarding rules.
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The only player at the European Championship younger than him is Spanish phenomenon Lamine Yamal, who will be 17 the day before the July 14 final.
Since turning 18 in early March, Zaire-Emery has been a man in a hurry. Before that, he was a boy who had to wait.
Just north of the Stade de France in Paris is a Leroy Merlin superstore — a French chain similar to Ikea. It is trapped between a canal and a motorway, in a windswept edgeland where rubbish tossed from passing car windows collects.
Back in 2018, the same year Kylian Mbappe exploded into international stardom at the World Cup, shoppers could well have seen a 12-year-old in a PSG kit looking out for his grandmother Ghislaine’s car, in need of a lift from the French capital’s deprived northern suburbs. Zaire-Emery was not playing over the road at France’s national stadium yet.
Ghislaine, known as Madame Gigi, is central to Zaire-Emery’s rise. As well as his ride to training, a field next to her house provided one of his main outlets, while she even ran the occasional training session at their local club. Her father, Maurice, was the first footballer in the family, having been a player for Sochaux.
“My grandmother was always there for me, whether it was in the cold, the snow,” Zaire-Emery told PSG’s website last year. “She would put on her little shawl and she would go and watch me.”
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She was also there in the sun. During summer holidays, Zaire-Emery and his three brothers — also all Ws, Wesley, William, and Wayne — would go with her to the Normandy coast in France’s north west, where they would play in the rock pools.
“He was fearless and caught lots of crabs and clams,” Ghislaine told newspaper Ouest-France about young Warren last year.
In some ways, PSG’s academy couldn’t get rid of Madame Gigi.
Zoumana Camara, coach of PSG’s under-19s, tells a story of her watching a training session from the other side of locked gates, and initially being asked to leave by security who did not recognise her. Once, after Zaire-Emery had graduated to the first-team squad, she arrived to watch the under-19s play local team Jeanne d’Arc de Drancy. Camara greeted her, but also asked what she was doing there.
“It’s still my team,” she replied. “(Zaire-Emery’s career) started with you.”
Strictly speaking, it started on the pitches of Aubervilliers — a suburb just south east of the Stade de France — overlooked by hulking brutalist apartment blocks. When Zaire-Emery started playing, they were natural grass — later replaced by 4G turf — with his father, Franck, coaching Aubervilliers’ women’s team.
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It helped that Zaire-Emery came from a footballing family — and not just great-grandfather Maurice. Franck played in the second division as a striker for Red Star, a club based just to the north of Paris proper but the Zaire-Emerys were also massive PSG fans, with Warren pictured in the Virage Auteuil stand at the Parc des Princes with the ultras before he turned 10 years old.
Across their 53 years of existence, PSG have been underperformers, but Zaire-Emery has never known them as anything but a behemoth — the Qatari takeover of the club happened in 2011, when he was five.
He joined their pre-academy at seven and often worked as a ball boy on PSG’s European nights — though, at the time, he wanted to be a firefighter.
What did PSG see in him?
“I had gone to Trappes (a town just west of Paris) for a tournament with my cousin and I had brought Warren,” Franck told French news outlet RMC Sport. “A ball came towards me, and I gave him a pass from around 30 meters (100ft). He cushioned it on his chest as if he’d been working on it every day. My cousin and I looked at each other and said, ‘That’s not bad at all’.”
Zaire-Emery joined the PSG academy proper when he was 12. Four years later, he made his first-team debut — but then he had always been precocious. His family recall a child who could tie his own shoelaces at four, and a young man who passed his driving test one year early, after a change in France’s licence laws.
However, PSG’s academy coaches had an issue. Not with the player himself, whose game intelligence as a junior was revered, but by what his rapid development meant for others.
“We felt that, paradoxically, everything was becoming counterproductive for the team, because when we lost the ball, Warren compensated for everything,” said Bafode Diakite, one of his early coaches. “He rebalanced everything and the others around made less effort. I reminded the other players that Warren was not the firefighter on duty.”
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Zaire-Emery had found a way to work as a firefighter after all.
But life was beginning to speed up and PSG’s academy could no longer constrain him.
In August 2022, the summer after being invited to train with the club’s first team by then-manager Mauricio Pochettino, Zaire-Emery made his official debut under Pochettino’s successor Christophe Galtier. He was 16 years, four months and 29 days old when he came on late in a 5-0 away win against Clermont. Lionel Messi and Sergio Ramos, two of his team-mates that day, made their senior international debuts before he was born.
This was not just a prize handed to a promising prospect — this was a true place in PSG’s first-team squad. Zaire-Emery played in 26 of the 38 Ligue 1 matches in that 2022-23 season, making eight starts, and became the youngest player to start a Champions League knockout-phase game in the February.
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It was not just his game understanding which impressed, but also his ability to survive physically at such a level.
“The way he can recover balls at his feet, it’s just exceptional,” said a rhapsodic France Under-21 head coach Thierry Henry, who made Zaire-Emery his captain at age 17. “Some players try to take the ball from him, but they are the ones who fall.”
This did not just happen by chance — his PSG coaches spoke of a player who at 13 was treating his body the way an established professional does.
Back then, every member of Zaire-Emery’s age group was handed a foam roller, and told how to use it as part of recovery work after training sessions.
At the end of that year, the youngsters handed their rollers back in. The majority had minor scuff marks on them, some had clearly not been used. There was only one that the coaching staff felt was too dilapidated to be handed out again to the next age group — Zaire-Emery’s.
“It’s something you have to do as soon as you get tired, sore,” Zaire-Emery said of that particular piece of equipment. “I used to come home from school at night and do a bit of rolling, sometimes I’d do some plank on my own. You do it for yourself, for your own progression — a professional footballer must be able to behave impeccably.”
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His intense focus and preparation in the gym, a space in which some players tend to mess around, saw the first-team squad, led by centre-back Presnel Kimpembe, nickname him ‘The Robot’.
Zaire-Emery’s calmness was also a factor.
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Virginie Megnin, who is in charge of academy players’ schooling at PSG, has described how “he built this shell for football… (which) allows him to advance through the ranks because there is very little emotion”. After being called up to the senior France squad for the first time, he remained completely deadpan, even with delighted team-mates jumping on top of him.
Mbappe, however, who has known him for over five years (Zaire-Emery was a youth team-mate of Kylian’s younger brother Ethan), and who sees himself as playing an older sibling role, has publicly criticised the ‘Robot’ portrayal.
“This nickname is unjustified; it has a reductive and inhuman side, whereas the kid is simply introverted,” Mbappe told Ouest-France. “He has emotions, as I’ve seen in the PSG dressing room. He’s trying to find his place, as best he can, in this big media landscape, where he’s not very comfortable. That’s why I insist on helping him off the pitch, trying to give him the keys to cope in this merciless world.”
It is striking that the only advice from Mbappe — whose standards are startlingly high — comes on matters off the pitch.
“It’s hard to say one attribute, I’m scared to forget one,” Yohan Cabaye, PSG’s assistant academy director, told The Athletic last year when asked about Zaire-Emery. “He’s a complete player. Don’t forget about his age. What he does on the field at 17, not many players can do it.”
Zaire-Emery is tactically versatile, capable of being a destroyer in a double-pivot or a facilitator, rather than an outright creator, as a dynamic No 8. PSG have even occasionally used him at right wing-back.
At this stage of his career, he prioritises ball retention rather than range with his passing, and to great effect — he is one of the most accurate young passers in Europe — generally threatening the goal directly more through his carrying rather than distribution.
One moment that showed his readiness for the top level came against Montpellier in February last year, six months into his senior career. With Montpellier threatening a late comeback, Zaire-Emery was played through down the right, Messi hovering behind to receive a cutback.
The natural choice for a 16-year-old, with one of the world’s greatest ever players coming up in support, would be to square it — but a trailing defender made it an awkward pass. So Zaire-Emery chose to shoot, scored, then ran into Messi’s embrace. PSG saw this as proof of his development.
“He has personality,” Mbappe said that week. “And to play here, what we want is players with personality. He’s 16, we don’t care. He doesn’t play with his age on his back. He comes, he brings what he can, and of course he will learn.”
Remember that firefighter in PSG’s under-19s? Last season, his second at senior level, Zaire-Emery began to fulfil that role with the first team.
When coach Luis Enrique made a tactical error in the Champions League group stage away against Newcastle at St James’ Park, allowing Zaire-Emery and Manuel Ugarte to get swarmed in a 4-2-4, it was Zaire-Emery who still managed to stand out in a 4-1 loss, chasing the game even as PSG’s established names froze. That night, Zaire-Emery became the youngest PSG player to provide an assist in the Champions League.
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”I’ve never seen a player as intelligent as he is in compensating for what his team-mates do,” Luis Enrique said later in the season.
Now, with Mbappe leaving for Real Madrid, Parisian football needs a new star.
Despite the talent on their doorstep, PSG’s academy has brought relatively few local youngsters through to the first team. Generally, Parisian players have either bypassed the first team and signed to begin their senior careers elsewhere, such as Mike Maignan (Lille) and Kingsley Coman (Juventus), or been developed at other clubs, such as Mbappe (Monaco), Randal Kolo Muani (Nantes), and Nordi Mukiele (Laval). Kimpembe is an exception.
Of PSG’s squad, Zaire-Emery is the player most likely to develop into one of the world’s best players — which makes the 18-year-old from the Paris suburbs the top candidate to assume Mbappe’s vacated mantle.
“I think it’ll be even harder for him,” Mbappe told reporters from the France camp last week. “I was programmed to get here. Since I was 13, the road has been mapped out, step by step. Warren, on the other hand, arrived suddenly. All of a sudden, boom! By the age of 16, he was training with us. But he was immediately accepted by the players, because talent is always recognised at PSG.
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“Now he’s going to have to face the difficulties of confirmation, and of embodying the Parisian project, because I know how demanding that is. I hope he won’t be under too much pressure. He has all the weapons he needs to become who he wants to be. It’s up to him to carry on.”
It was not quite an explosion out of nowhere — Zaire-Emery and his agent, the high-profile Jorge Mendes, had been holding conversations with the club about his pathway even before his elevation to the first team, but there has been a sense that the midfielder emerged fully-formed. Mbappe has described him as “playing like a 30-year-old”.
Six years ago, Mbappe burst onto the international scene at 18, becoming the breakout story of the 2018 World Cup, which France won. Zaire-Emery now has a European Championship to play in at the same age. He has had to delay passing his baccalaureate exams (France’s equivalent to A-Levels in the UK) because of the tournament — after initially scheduling them for this summer, he will now complete his studies in the autumn.
It is unlikely that Zaire-Emery will start at these Euros, which begin for France today (Monday) against Austria. Though Deschamps is versatile in his setup, Eduardo Camavinga, N’Golo Kante, Adrien Rabiot and Aurelien Tchouameni (albeit the latter is recovering from a foot injury that forced him to miss the recent Champions League final for Real Madrid) are all more likely options. Deschamps, however, often plays three in midfield, and could spring a surprise.
If his name is called, the expectation is that Zaire-Emery will show the fearlessness he has displayed since he was a child, catching crabs and clams on holiday in Normandy and putting out fires across the nation’s youth-team pitches.
When he was in PSG’s under-16s, the club held an oratory competition to develop the players’ public-speaking skills, in which each of them was asked to defend a particular quote. Zaire-Emery chose a famous line from 17th century play Le Cid, recently appropriated by Parisian rappers:
“For well-born souls, value does not wait for the number of years.”
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(Top photo: Pedro Salado/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)