Kylian Mbappé: The French Phenomenon

If you were to build a talent from scratch—a kind of superhuman football prodigy—you’d probably start with the genes. Give the kid a father who’s an ex-footballer and now a coach, and a mother who has played, say, professional handball. Place him in one of the hotspots for youth development, like the suburbs of Paris. Make him mature, disciplined and obsessed with self-improvement. Then let him play for a local club and watch him fly. As experiments go, it would have been a fascinating one, and yet we’re lucky enough to see it in real life. So far we know the story up until nineteen years, the age at which Kylian Mbappé has now won the World Cup, joined Paris Saint-Germain and become the second-most expensive player of all time. Few would disagree that he is the most gifted teenager in football, and one of the greatest talents of his generation. The question now is: how good is he going to get?

With no way of saying for sure, coaches and commentators have compared him to other greats whom he might emulate. Arsène Wenger has mentioned Thierry Henry, presumably because they share similar traits and backgrounds. As Mbappé flew past Argentine defenders in Russia, some recalled Ronaldo at the 1998 World Cup—among them Nicolás Anelka, Marcello Lippi and Didier Deschamps. The stats recorded by Mbappé have been put next to those of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, the two giants of this generation. And as we wait to see how far Mbappe will go, extrapolating from previous careers might not be a bad idea. What Henry, Ronaldo, Cristiano and Messi did at his age could well help indicate whether Mbappé will become merely a very good player, a Ballon d’Or winner, or, in an extreme case, someone who will surpass them all.

Mbappé was born on 20 December 1998 in Bondy, a suburb in Paris. His father, Wilfried, is an ex-footballer from Cameroon, and was until recently a coach; Mbappe’s mother, Fayza, is an ex-handball player from Algeria. The culture and genes in the family must have been favourable: Kylian’s younger brother, Ethan, plays for PSG’s youth teams; and his adoptive brother, Jirès Kembo Ekoko, plays for Bursaspor. Yet none of these two was put on the path to greatness like Kylian. Almost before he could walk, Wilfried would take him to the local club, AS Bondy. “You could say that Kylian was born here at this club,” Atmane Airouche, the Bondy president, told the BBC. “He was here as a baby when his father was a player and a coach. He was always here and learning about football, even as a toddler. When we played games, just before kick-off you’d see a two-year-old walk in with a ball. He’d sit with us to listen to the team talks.”

When Mbappé joined Bondy, he soon began to play with kids who were older. “You could tell he was different,” Antonio Riccardi, a coach at the club, told the BBC. Mentored by Wilfried, Mbappé adopted a professional mentality and a willingness to learn. “You ask him something once, and the second time he does it,” Riccardi told ESPN. By the time he was twelve, Mbappé enrolled at Clairefontaine, the national football academy. The main European clubs now wanted him, to the extent that he could practically choose the team he wanted.

By that point Mbappé had already been on trial at Chelsea. The move had been set up by Serge Daniel Boga, a scout who had watched him at Bondy. During his stay Mbappé played for Chelsea’s U-12 team against Charlton, partnering Tammy Abraham up front, and met Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda. “It was a wonderful experience,” Mbappé would say. Yet instead of signing him on the spot, Chelsea worried about his work rate off the ball. After the first trial, they asked his family for a second one. Boga recently told Goal how Fayza responded to the request. “Listen,” she told Boga, who was acting as an interpreter. “My boy won’t be coming back. If they want him, they have to take him now, or in five year’s time they’ll be coming back to buy him for €50m.”

As it happened, Fayza was wrong. The price would be €180m.

“She knew the quality of her son,” Boga told Goal.

At fourteen, Mbappé also visited Real Madrid, where he met Zinédine Zidane, the coach of Castilla. But the Mbappé family rejected their offer. That Fayza and Wilfried turned down clubs such as Madrid and Chelsea denoted the confidence they had in him, and the extent to which they had planned out his career. In that sense Mbappé’s childhood resembled that of another Parisian prodigy, whose father had decided that his son would become a professional footballer.

Thierry Henry was born in Les Ulis, a suburb in Paris, to Antoine, from Guadeloupe, and Maryse, from Martinique. Antoine projected onto Thierry his own failed ambitions to turn professional. Driven on by his father, Thierry became good enough to go to Clairefontaine, and in his early teens he joined Monaco. Yet there were no offers from clubs such as Chelsea or Madrid. One person who did seem certain that he’d make it, however, was Antoine. According to Philippe Auclair, an Henry biographer, Antoine was once stopped for speeding, at which point he told the police officers: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Thierry Henry’s father!” Thierry was thirteen.

As Henry went to a national institution, Ronaldo dropped out of one. Born near Rio de Janeiro, he played football instead of going to class, and quit school in seventh grade. This worried Sonia, his mother, who had divorced her husband when Ronaldo was eleven, and who was now toiling away in a restaurant for up to twelve hours a day. Soon Ronaldo joined Social Ramos, a futsal team, scoring one hundred and sixty-six goals in his first season. As agents raved about him, Sonia despaired. “I could not accept the fact that my son thought only of playing football,” she’d tell O Globo, according to The Washington Post. “What kind of future would he have?”

Wondering the same was probably Maria Dolores, the mother of Cristiano. She had not even planned to have him. Her husband, José Dinis, had begun drinking after coming home from the Portuguese Colonial War. But at least Cristiano seemed to enjoy playing for Andorinha and Nacional, the two teams he joined during his brief childhood on Madeira. He showed such promise that Sporting offered him a trial. At twelve, Cristiano left to live at their academy in Lisbon.

Messi also had to leave his family. Born in Rosario to Jorge and Celia, he joined Grandoli, then Newell’s. According to some sources, Messi scored close to five hundred goals for the club. But he left when Newell’s refused to fund the treatment of his growth hormone deficiency. With no money to pay for it himself, Jorge used family contacts in Catalonia to set up a trial at Barcelona. The club agreed to sign Messi and pay for the treatment. At thirteen, Leo left home.

Strange as it might sound, Barça were initially reluctant to sign Messi, in part because of the expensive treatment. They would surely have had no such doubts about Mbappé, who seemed as safe a bet as you’d find. Having weighed up offers from a series of clubs, Mbappé and his family chose Monaco, who had a sound track record for youth development. “There are other very good academies in the world of football,” Vadim Vasilyev, the Monaco owner, told CNN. “But we give the chance for the boys to play in the first team.”

As other teenagers began drinking and chasing girls, Mbappé kept watching games and analysing how he could improve. He’d later say that he never really had a childhood. Such was his dedication that even his father seemed taken aback. “He’s crazy,” Wilfried told FourFourTwo. “I work in football and he almost puts me off it because he’s always into it, twenty-four/seven.” At sixteen, Mbappé made his debut for the first team. At seventeen, he played at the U-19 Euros in Germany, scoring five goals to lead France to the title. As he turned eighteen, he was halfway through his first season as a regular at Monaco. The rest of the world was beginning to pay attention.

Where was Henry at that point? A little behind. Having come out of Clairefontaine, he made his Monaco debut at seventeen, then struck two goals in eight league games. Down in Brazil, Ronaldo was wreaking havoc. At sixteen he joined Cruzeiro, one of the leading clubs in the country, and racked up forty-four goals in his first year; Cruzeiro won the Brazilian cup (1993) and the Minas Gerais state championship (1994). At seventeen, he made his senior Brazil debut; a few months later, he made the squad for the 1994 World Cup. He never played in the tournament, but celebrated as Brazil won it. That same summer, he joined PSV Eindhoven.

Cristiano made his Sporting debut at the same age. So did Messi, who scored once in seven league games in his first season at Barça. And so Ronaldo was ahead of the rest. Only he had terrorised defences in his own league, won domestic titles and played senior international football. Only he had been to a World Cup—and won one. Closest to him was Mbappé, whose wait for his international debut would not last long.

In 2017, at eighteen, Mbappé helped Monaco win a league title that, given PSG’s resources, should hardly have been possible. As his team-mates celebrated, he went home and rested. By then Mbappé had made his debut for France, and led Monaco to the semi-finals of the Champions League, where he had tormented Juventus and put one past Gianluigi Buffon. “At his age,” Buffon told UEFA.com, “he is probably even better in front of goal than Henry was.”

Buffon seemed to be right. That season Mbappe struck fifteen goals and recorded eight assists in Ligue 1. In April that same year, The Financial Times counted the goals and assists so far that season to find the most productive player in the top five European leagues—Spain, Germany, England, Italy, France. They excluded penalties. Cristiano was nineteenth on the list. Messi was second. Mbappé—who would finish the campaign with a goal involvement every sixty-five minutes—was top.

What did the other players do at eighteen? Henry had become a regular at Monaco, hitting nine league goals in one season. Ronaldo rammed home thirty of them in his first season at PSV. Cristiano made his Portugal debut and was midway through his first season at Manchester United, where the stepovers were many but the goals few. Also Messi made his international debut, and became a key part of the Barça first team. Yet with six goals in seventeen league games, he was no Mbappé. Only Ronaldo was.

What Mbappé has done at nineteen is well documented. Now at PSG, he scored thirteen league goals last season to win another Ligue 1 title. At that age Henry was still at Monaco. Ronaldo kept toying with defenders at PSV, but that was in the Dutch league. Cristiano played for United, yet still had long to go before he’d turn into a herculean goalscorer. The only one who outshone Mbappé at club level was Messi, who hit fourteen goals in twenty-six league games, including a hat-trick in the Clásico, a famous solo goal against Getafe and a goal with his hand against Espanyol. Just as Mbappé is now evoking Henry and Ronaldo, Messi was turning into Diego Maradona.

And yet not even Messi could help his country to the World Cup title at nineteen, like Mbappé did. Facing Argentina in the round of 16, Mbappé produced one of the displays of the tournament, waltzing past his rivals as if he were back with his friends at Bondy. He scored in the final, becoming the first teenager to do so since Pelé struck for Brazil against Sweden in 1958. At this point Henry had still not played for the French first team. Ronaldo was being selected for Brazil, but had to wait two years for the next World Cup. Cristiano made the best effort, scoring twice as Portugal reached the final at Euro 2004. As for Messi, he did go to the World Cup at nineteen. But unlike Mbappé, he only started one game.

Counting the main statistics, Mbappé now has fifty-two club goals. At nineteen, Messi had twenty-five. Mbappé has ten goals in the Champions League; Messi had two. Mbappé has nine goals for the national team; Messi had four. This summer The Financial Times ran through the numbers of goalscoring teenagers in the top five leagues, plus the Champions League and competitive international games, over the last three decades. Cristiano had 0.3 goals per game, Henry had 0.43. Messi had 0.54. Mbappé had 0.69. Nobody had more.When smaller leagues were included, however, one player did beat Mbappé. Ronaldo had 0.84 goals per game at PSV.Are goals everything? It’s true that Henry, Cristiano and Messi all played more on the flank in their teenage years than Mbappé has done to date, even if Mbappé now also plays out wide for PSG. Henry was a pure winger at Monaco, as was Cristiano at United. Messi was more of a roaming playmaker, but only moved into a permanent central role years later. Messi and Cristiano also played for bigger teams in bigger leagues, whereas Mbappé plays in Ligue 1.Yet by most measures, Mbappé is in front anyway—alongside Ronaldo. Irrespective of major tournaments, they both played for their countries earlier. At the age Mbappé is now, Henry was half a year away from taking part in the 1998 World Cup. Cristiano was a talented winger, but also frustrating and immature. Messi was thrilling but raw. Cristiano would win the Ballon d’Or at twenty-three, Messi at twenty-two, Ronaldo at twenty. At nineteen, Mbappé is in contention.In their study this summer, The Financial Times found two categories of talents: those who continued to evolve, and those who fell off, such as Bojan Krkić and Alexandre Pato. The question is to which category Mbappé belongs. Common pitfalls include complacency, disastrous career choices and serious injuries—the latter halting Ronaldo. When he likened Mbappé to Henry, Wenger seemed to regard attitude as a prerequisite for greatness. “This young boy has to show that he has similar qualities on the mental front that Thierry had,” Wenger said.Yet Mbappé already seems to have such qualities. Journalists mention how articulate he is. His dedication seems to border on the ascetic. It was easy forget how old he actually is when, last February, he was invited to meet George Weah, the Liberia president, and Emmanuel Macron, the France president, to discuss the future of African sport. “When you talk to him,” Vasilyev told CNN, “you don’t talk to a nineteen-year-old boy. You talk to a thirty- or twenty-five-year-old, at least.”Mbappé also seems aware of the traps ahead. In an interview with Le Monde this year, he was asked whether the most talented in football always wins. He was talking about teams, but could just as well have referred to individuals. “There is no guarantee that, if you are good, you will succeed, because you need more than that,” he said. “That is sad. You need a strong mind before you’re a good player, because everything can crumble overnight. And you have to be ready, because you can climb so high and come down so fast. And that, for some, is difficult to live with.”The interviewer then asked him how he would cope with that.“It’s a daily preparation,” Mbappé said. “It’s education, learning: how to memorise and execute everything you’ve learned. How to react when you’re facing problems. It’s up to you to pay attention to everything you do, because there are good players everywhere, and not just in France. In order to keep playing on a global level, it takes more than just playing football.”Mbappé can also count on his family on his road to greatness. “They’re always by my side,” he told Marca. “When things happen as quickly as they have to me, it’s important to have your people close so that your feet stay grounded, your head stays cool and you feel calm. People who remind you that things have just gotten started.”

And so most of the ingredients seem to be in place. “He will never change because his education is so good,” Riccardi told the BBC. “Behind him he has his parents, who are fantastic people. He has a great family unit. He believes in family and he doesn’t want to let them down.”

“They’re an amazing family supporting him,” Vasilyev told CNN. “They’re next to him, are very intelligent people and are a really good, healthy family.”

Did Vasilyev think Mbappé will become better than Henry? “I know Kylian and he doesn’t like to be compared,” Vasilyev said. “He respects Thierry a lot, but he doesn’t want to be compared to anybody. He is himself. He will write his own history.”