This French footballer, son of the TF1 news presenter, is in Thierry Henry’s favor for the Paris Olympics.
Growing up with famous parents is never easy, growing up with parents who “enter” your home every day because they are journalists and presenters is even less obvious. So growing up seeing your mother at the head of the biggest television news in France…
Sékou Mara is still unknown to the general public, but he is much less so in the world of football. Having recently become a professional footballer, he currently plays as a striker for the English team Southampton in the Championship (2nd English division). A promising youngster, the native of Paris has always been in the good books of the French hopeful team and is applying for a place at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Competition is fierce in this position, especially if the attackers of Didier Deschamps’ A team like Kylian Mbappé, Antoine Griezmann or Olivier Giroud want to participate in the Olympics. But Sékou Mara has played through all the Blues’ youth teams and therefore already has experience, a weighty argument when choosing for the Espoirs coach, Thierry Henry.
Passed by Bordeaux which launched him in Ligue 1 in 2021, a club which allowed him to emerge in the eyes of the general public and to sign him in the Premier League for 11 million euros, Sékou Mara even already has 4 selections with the French hopeful team of Thierry Henry. His first selection dates back to September 2, 2021 with a qualifying match for the Euro against Macedonia and a 3-0 victory. His second came four days later against the Faroe Islands. After two years of absence, he returned in 2023 in a friendly against Denmark before scoring his very first goal with the France A’ team during the Blues’ victory against Slovenia for Euro qualifying. hopes.
If he still needs to break through to enter the football pantheon, Sékou Mara also has a well-known surname. He is none other than the son of journalist Audrey-Crespo Mara, Anne Claire Coudray’s joker for the weekend television news on TF1 since 2019. The presenter was also a journalist on LCI from 2007 to 2020 and is currently the author, since 2020, of the “Portrait of the Week” in the news magazine Seven to eight on TF1.
Aged 47, Audrey Crespo Mara is the partner of the famous journalist Thierry Ardisson, but before this union, she was married to Aliou Mara, an entrepreneur of Senegalese origin, from whom she divorced in 2009. Two children were born from this marriage , Sékou and Lamine, in 2002 and 2005 respectively.
And Sékou Mara could return to France and get closer to his mother after the Olympics. Author of 3 goals since the start of the season with his club Southampton, the young player could quickly change his tune. He would be the target of several Ligue 1 clubs, while teams from the German top 5 and Italian top 6 would also be very attentive to the attacker’s situation.