‘No one gives a break’- Brazil boss slams Kylian Mbappe for claiming competition in the Americas is bleak

Brazil’s national team coach currently finds himself in a feud with star forward Kylian Mbappe as he rejected the Frenchman’s assessment of South American football, in which he claimed that the qualifiers for the FIFA World Cup were much easier for teams from that part of the world due to a lack of quality competition as teams are not as advanced as those in Europe.

In a recent interaction with the media, Tite dismissed these claims, declaring that the matches between South American teams are much more difficult compared to those between European countries. 

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“Maybe [Mbappe] is talking about these Nations League clashes or European friendlies, but not World Cup qualifiers. We don’t have, with all due respect, Azerbaijan to play. We don’t have anyone that gives you a break. The qualifiers here have a much higher degree of difficulty than the group stage [of European qualifying].”

It is interesting to note that Tite is not the only one who seemingly took offence or disagreed with Mbappe’s statements regarding the quality of football being played in South Africa. The Frenchman’s Paris Saint-Germain teammate and Argentine footballing icon Lionel Messi also offered his two cents on the same.

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“Many times we talked about that in Spain. When we came back from a qualifying (match), we told them, ‘You don’t know how difficult it would be for you to qualify for the World Cup if you had to go there, at the altitude, the head, Venezuela’…” said Lionel Messi in a previous media interaction.

Kylian Mbappe, who is already a world champion with France, is looking to bolster his country’s prospects of bagging the most coveted trophy in international football in the world. Should France lay claim to the title in Qatar, it will successfully become the first country to defend its FIFA World Cup title in almost 60 years after Brazil.