There is a famous photograph of Kylian Mbappe as a 14-year-old at home in Bondy on the outskirts of Paris, sitting on his bed in a room plastered with posters of his hero Cristiano Ronaldo.
When talking about the extraordinary rise of a young athlete, from humble beginnings to the biggest stages in world sport, we are almost duty-bound to suggest there is no way he could have imagined what lay ahead back then: lighting up the Champions League for Monaco and signing for Paris Saint-Germain in a €180million ($198million, £155 million) deal at 18, winning the World Cup at 19, scoring a hat-trick for France in a World Cup final at 23, becoming PSG’s record goalscorer at 24 and now seemingly heading towards fulfilling another ambition by joining Real Madrid at 25 after informing PSG he is leaving the club at the end of the season.
But Mbappe was certain. One of his first coaches recalls him memorising and belting out La Marseillaise as a six-year-old “because one day I will play for the France team”.
Around that time, a family friend bought him a model of Real Madrid’s stadium to indulge or perhaps mock his insistence the Bernabeu was his destiny. Mbappe responded by forcibly telling him, “No, one day I will take you there.”
Then there is the story of how, in a classroom at Monaco’s youth academy, he and his peers were given an assignment to design a magazine cover.
They were all sufficiently self-absorbed to put themselves on the cover. But Mbappe’s submission stood out not just because, for once, he was immersed in a classroom assignment but because, rather than a football or fashion magazine, he had imagined himself (“Kylian Mbappe: El Maestro”, the best young player in the world) on the front page of Time, seemingly underlining an ambition to transcend the sport.
The world is full of young footballers who are utterly convinced they will make it to the very top. Some of them have the talent to back up their confidence. But few of them even come close to fulfilling their presumed destiny. Only a tiny proportion make the big time. Only one can emerge as, it increasingly appears, the dominant footballer of his generation.
In the dressing room at Lusail Stadium in Doha, Didier Deschamps was reading the riot act.
France were 2-0 down to a Lionel Messi-inspired Argentina at half-time in the 2022 World Cup final and the coach flew into an uncharacteristic rage, telling his players, “You’re not there!” and adding the difference between their opponents and themselves was that “they are playing in a f***ing final and we’re not.”
Some of the players sat quietly, looking sullen. But Mbappe jumped to his feet. “It’s a World Cup final, it’s the match of a lifetime!” he yelled. “We cannot do worse than we did (in the first half). We return to the field. Either we let them play or we increase the intensity, we get into the duels and we do something else, guys.
“It’s a World Cup final! We’re down by two goals. We can come back. Guys, this is every four years!”
Mbappe was 23 years old, the second-youngest player in France’s starting line-up. But youth has never lessened his sense of destiny. To borrow a memorable line uttered by former Arsenal striker Ian Wright about Bukayo Saka and, before that, by Loki in The Avengers, he is burdened with glorious purpose.
What happened next in Doha was extraordinary. With time running out, Mbappe converted a penalty to reduce the deficit and then, 97 seconds later, struck a powerful volley to equalise. In stoppage time, he cut infield, leaving Argentinian defenders trailing in his wake, and hit a rising shot that was deflected just over the crossbar, denying him what would surely have been the most dramatic hat-trick in football history.
He was a young man on a mission: another ice-cool penalty to equalise after Argentina went 3-2 up in extra time and another two mesmerising high-speed, high-octane dribbles of the type that leave you wondering if the guy is for real.
Of course, it ended up being Messi’s night and Messi’s tournament, the crowning glory to end all crowning glories.
But it was also the night that removed any remaining doubt as to his heir apparent.
Within six months, Messi departed the European stage for good, leaving Paris Saint-Germain for Inter Miami. Not quite an abdication, but, with Messi heading to Major League Soccer and his great rival Cristiano Ronaldo taking residence in the Saudi Pro League, it felt like the stage had been cleared.
“Many great players who have shaped the history of football have left Europe this summer and we are entering a new era,” Mbappe said in an interview published in the latest issue of GQ.
The Mbappe era? He will believe so, particularly now he is surely heading for Madrid.
He has scored 243 goals in 290 appearances for PSG, winning five Ligue 1 titles to add to the one he won at Monaco, but there has always been the sense of a player who, for once in his life, has found himself having to wait to fulfil his destiny on the very biggest stage in club football.
At Real Madrid, he would have precisely that.
In December 2012, the night before his 14th birthday, Mbappe received an invitation to visit Real Madrid for a trial.
He was already enrolled at Clairefontaine, the French Football Federation’s training centre for elite young players, and attracting interest from half the clubs in Ligue 1 as well as from Chelsea where, as this piece memorably details, his mother Fayza Lamari was riled by the suggestion that he come back for a second trial.
“No, we won’t come again,” she told an interpreter to inform the Chelsea coaches. “Tell them, ‘If you want to sign him, you sign him now. In five years’ time you will come back for him for £50 million.’ Translate that!”
The trip to Madrid was a different matter. Mbappe, unusually, was star-struck. He and his parents were greeted at the airport by the great Zinedine Zidane, then on the club’s technical staff, who addressed him by name and offered him a ride in his car. Mbappe marvelled at the leather upholstery and flew into a panic, asking Zidane whether he should take off his shoes. Zidane laughed.
He was given a tour of the club’s vast training complex, where he was introduced to Ronaldo. There is a photograph of the two of them: the teenage wannabe looking shy and awkward next to his hero. It might have been artistic licence, but in “Je M’Appelle Kylian Mbappe”, the autobiographical graphic novel he released in 2021, Mbappe appeared to suggest Zidane was the man behind the camera.
At the time, Mbappe called it the best weekend of his life. It only strengthened his resolve to play for Madrid, but his family were committed to finding a club in France to launch his career.
PSG were interested, but the most persuasive overtures initially came from Caen and Lens. Caen’s first offer led his father, Wilfried, to ask why they were “trying to catch a shark with a fishing rod”. They raised their offer and eventually agreed a deal, but the board wouldn’t ratify it. Aghast at this decision, the recruitment department resigned en masse.
In the end, Monaco emerged as the favoured destination. It was the summer of 2013 and, at a time when the club’s Russian owner Dmitry Rybolovlev was splashing the cash on Joao Moutinho, James Rodriguez and Radamel Falcao, the signing of a 14-year-old on a youth contract generated few headlines.
But he was certain they would come — even if others kept warning him he had to change.
If there were doubts over Mbappe, they concerned his attitude. That confident, driven nature and that boundless energy brought challenges.
Whenever family friends, teachers and coaches have spoken about him as an adolescent, they have alluded to hyperactive tendencies.
An early assessment of his behaviour concluded that he was “gifted” but that he might struggle to follow a “normal” education programme. There was difficulty establishing whether he was left or right-handed. In L’Equipe’s documentary “Kylian Mbappe: Hors Normes”, one of his secondary-school teachers, Nicole Lefevre, recalls him as “borderline hyperactive”.
It is unclear whether this was suggested in a medical sense or more generally, but Mbappe has admitted to being a difficult pupil. In his first-person article for the Players’ Tribune in 2022, he apologised to teachers and recalled “coming home from school one day with nine different warnings from the principal”.
His mother, a coordinator in the recreation department in Bondy’s local authority, was frequently summoned to school. She would be angry to hear of misbehaviour but she often sought to remind his teachers that he was “special”, not just a wayward kid.
She tried to engage him in other activities: swimming, visiting the Louvre, even taking up the transverse flute. But despite his ability in the classroom and a flair for languages — achieving fluency in English and Spanish — he had a one-track mind. Anything that got in the way of his football ambitions was unwelcome.
Stories of gifted young athletes being restless in the classroom, disengaged from their studies, are nothing new. But a hyperactive, distracted nature, struggling with discipline, is often cited in relation to a player’s struggle to fulfil his or her potential.
Whether right or wrong, the established narrative with Mbappe is that his nature made him unstoppable.
But Mbappe was not a model pupil in the sporting arena either. Those who coached him in his early days at AS Bondy recall him being like a “sponge”, able to soak up and retain information as well as show an innate understanding of technical instructions and positional concepts, but even at Clairefontaine and his academy days at Monaco he remained an individualist rather than a conformist. Dribble, shoot and score. Dribble, shoot and score. Dribble, shoot and score.
He was the most gifted among La Generation ’98 but his progress at Clairefontaine was not unblemished. Gerard Precheur, the former director of the academy, spoke in that L’Equipe documentary about a work ethic which was “not always well perceived by his coach at the time and by his comrades” and “could be taken as complacency, but I would say that it was not the case.”
Football-wise, the biggest battle the young Mbappe had was with Bruno Irles, who coached Monaco’s under-17 team. Irles felt the youngster lacked the right level of application. “The goal was really to show him what he was missing: what he had as a strong point and what he was missing for the high level,” the coach said.
“We said to him, ‘Yes, this is good, that’s good’ but I didn’t feel he was very receptive to comments that would have been constructive for him. At a certain point, pointing out what was wrong with his game and pointing out that there were ways to progress differently, … it became a bit tense around that.”
More than a bit tense. The relationship between player and coach disintegrated. His mother demanded a meeting with Monaco’s sporting director Luis Campos, warning that the youngster’s talent was being stifled and he would leave if he was not shown more respect. Mbappe ended up being allowed to train away from Irles, who quietly moved on at the end of the season to take up a position at AC Arles-Avignon.
Back on track, Mbappe was drafted into Monaco’s B team at the age of 16 and then, soon afterwards, the first-team squad. In December 2015, aged 16 years and 347 days, he made his professional debut, breaking Thierry Henry’s record to become the youngest first-team player in Monaco’s history.
And by this stage of his development, emerging from adolescence, his precocity, self-assurance and boundless energy were making him appear unstoppable.
Mbappe had just broken into Monaco’s first-team squad when Arsene Wenger first set eyes on him. “When I saw him the first time, I said, ‘It’s Pele!’,” the former Monaco and Arsenal manager recalled a few years later.
Even now, more than six decades on from the 1958 World Cup, the late, great Pele remains the gold standard when talking about teenage football prodigies making a grand entrance onto the game’s biggest stage.
Cristiano Ronaldo was extravagantly gifted, if inconsistent, when he joined Manchester United from Sporting Lisbon at 18. Messi’s talents were mesmerising when he began to establish himself in Barcelona’s first team around the same age, but there was a physical fragility that he had not yet fully overcome. Mbappe? At 17 he already looked ready, mentally and certainly physically, to test himself at elite level.
In the summer of 2016, after France were agonisingly beaten on home soil by Portugal in the European Championship final, Mbappe excelled, scoring five goals, as their under-19 won their age-group title in Germany. Even if he was eclipsed in that tournament by his team-mate Jean-Kevin Augustin, but while the latter has struggled to fulfil his potential, Mbappe was about to go from strength to strength.
His performances for Monaco in the first half of that 2016-17 season drew rave reviews in France and comparisons with Henry as well as admiring glances from clubs further afield. But the matches that brought his talents to a wider audience came against Manchester City in the last 16 of the Champions League, scoring a goal in both legs and terrorising the Premier League’s defence with his pace.
“Mbappe …,” Pep Guardiola said after the first leg, shaking his head. “He is so fast.”
The forward scored three times over two legs against Borussia Dortmund in the quarter-final, ending that season with 26 goals in all competitions for Monaco and forcing his way into the France senior squad, becoming the youngest debutant for Les Bleus since Maryan Wisniewski more than six decades earlier.
“It is quite remarkable what he has been doing, how calm and mature he is,” said France coach Didier Deschamps. “What makes him such a strong player, apart from his ability, is the way he always remains calm. That is very rare for someone his age.”
In the space of 12 months, Mbappe had gone from being a potential “next big thing” to a player all the leading clubs wanted. Barcelona were extremely keen, particularly when Neymar left for PSG. Arsenal and Liverpool both made serious enquiries to his entourage in the summer of 2017, with Arsene Wenger meeting him to try to persuade him to move to London. Both Manchester clubs showed interest. But the clubs pushing hardest were Real Madrid and PSG.
Madrid were strong favourites, confident that he would jump at the opportunity to move to the Spanish capital. Their offer of €180million (€150million guaranteed, €30million linked to future success) was accepted by Monaco. In an interview with Canal+, Vadim Vasilyev, Monaco’s vice-president at the time, recalled telling Mbappe, “We have received an offer that was impossible to refuse, from the club of your dreams, so tell me your answer.”
But Mbappe’s negotiations with Madrid proved problematic. His father Wilfried wanted guarantees about playing time — not easy with Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo joined by Gareth Bale, Lucas Vazquez and Marco Asensio — and expected Mbappe to be among the club’s highest earners. At a meeting in California, where Madrid were on pre-season tour, Wilfried told the Spanish club’s hierarchy PSG had offered more money and more guarantees selection-wise. Relations were strained.
To the surprise of many, Mbappe ended up joining PSG. The French club had already broken the world transfer record to sign Neymar for €222million that summer, so they proposed a deal where he would move on a season-long loan from Monaco before making a permanent €180million transfer at the end of the season. “This is the project that will help me develop while I win titles,” he declared. Real Madrid could wait.
Along with Neymar’s move to Paris, Mbappe’s transfer caused deep disquiet among European football’s elite. Almost immediately UEFA announced a formal investigation into PSG’s finances, “particularly in light of its recent transfer activity”. The investigation was closed 10 months later with UEFA saying that PSG’s finances “will remain under scrutiny”.
But there was a more wholesome angle to the deal. At 18 years old, Mbappe was coming home.
Shortly after being paraded in front of the media at the Parc des Princes on September 6, 2017, Mbappe got into a car and was driven from Paris’s leafy western suburbs, around La Peripherique to the north-east, back to where it all began: back to Bondy, back to “le 93”, le neuf-trois.
You can take the boy out of Bondy. But Mbappe has always said you cannot take the Bondy out of the boy.
“In Bondy, you learn values that go beyond football,” he wrote in his Players Tribune article in 2020. “You learn to treat everyone the same, because you’re all in the same pot. You all dream the same dream. In Bondy, in the 93, in the banlieues, maybe there is not a lot of money, it’s true. But we are dreamers. We’re born that way, I think. Maybe it’s because dreaming doesn’t cost much. In fact it’s free.”
And so, in an event laid on by Nike, a €180million teenager kicked a ball around with boys and girls who shared his dreams. Overlooking them, on the side of a building, was a huge mural declaring Bondy to be “ville des possibles”, town of possibilities.
The 93rd departement, Seine-Saint-Denis, has the highest proportion of immigrants and the highest poverty rate. According to INSEE (France’s national institute of statistics and economic studies), 28.6 per cent of Bondy’s 50,000-plus residents live below the poverty line.
Like so many of those economically challenged neighbourhoods in the sprawling Parisian suburbs, it is also a breeding ground for football talent. Three members of the France squad at the 2022 World Cup, Mbappe, William Saliba and Randal Kolo Muani, are from Bondy.
At AS Bondy, where he took his first steps as a footballer under his father’s tuition, Mbappe’s legacy is enormous.
“He’s so influential, particularly among the youngsters,” says Ahmed Fettah, who coaches one of the girls’ teams. “My son looks to Mbappe. My daughter wasn’t attracted to football at first, but she too has been inspired by Mbappe and by some of the women’s players, so now she also comes here to play.
“It’s like there’s a fashion effect, the effect that comes from the success of Mbappe and all these players. Among the West African and Arabic people in the suburbs, it’s inspirational.”
On June 16 2018, still a teenager, Mbappe stood in the tunnel at the Kazan Arena before France’s opening game of the 2018 World Cup against Australia.
“Look at us,” he said to his team-mate Ousmane Dembele as they prepared to walk out. “The boy from Evreux and the boy from Bondy. We’re playing at the World Cup.”
He was still only 19. But by the time he left Russia a month later, he was a world champion, scoring four goals (including two against Messi’s Argentina in the last 16 and one in the final against Croatia) as France won the trophy for the second time. He was the first teenager to score in a World Cup final since Pele in 1958. “Welcome to the club,” the great Brazilian declared.
It wasn’t just the goals. His performance against Argentina was breathtaking. Michael Cox revisited it four years later as part of his Reconsidered series for The Athletic and concluded that, if anything, it was even better than had been remembered.
He likened one Mbappe run, to win a penalty for France’s opening goal, to watching “a Formula 1 driver deploying DRS”. “But it’s about more than that,” Cox wrote. “It’s about the fact that Argentina are utterly terrified of him.”
Some felt the game in Kazan signalled a changing of the guard, with the sun setting on Messi’s international career and his World Cup aspirations, replaced in the sporting firmament by a new football phenomenon more than a decade his junior.
It didn’t quite work out that way; Messi would have a rather significant say in Qatar four years later, aged 35. But Mbappe’s status as the leader of the next generation seemed secure.
The final at Luzhniki Stadium was a strange occasion. So often over the previous three decades, World Cup finals had been tense encounters between two teams frightened of making a mistake. In 2018, by contrast, there were thrills and spills galore. It was an entertaining match rather than a great one, but Mbappe’s goal, swept past Danijel Subasic from the edge of the penalty area to put France 4-1 up and put the outcome beyond doubt, will live long in the memory.
“We’ve just watched the purest thing in sports,” Brian Phillips wrote in The Ringer. “A story that ends: and the kid went out and did it.
“The grand narrative of soccer is written in heaven by a group of angelic hippopotami — they wear togas— and we’ve just watched them start a new page.”
Remember how, in that classroom assignment during his time at Monaco’s academy, Mbappe imagined himself on the front page of Time?
In October 2018 he made it there for real, the cover star for Time’s “next generation leaders” issue, which highlighted “the faces who will shape the world in years to come”.
He felt it surreal. “My life has been totally upside-down,” he told the magazine.
At the same time, he could hardly have been better prepared for the demands of modern superstardom. He grew up in the age of social media. He felt certain he was destined for the top. Nothing really seemed to faze him or blow him off course. Although his parents separated, his family network remained a source of solidity, strength and support, helping to keep his feet on the ground.
He told Time he felt he “might have missed out on something” due to his fame. “I did not have the moments of so-called normal people during adolescence, like going out with friends, enjoying good times.”
Instead, he had been forced to do his growing up in public. But, he said, “I’m happy. I’m living the life I always dreamed of.”
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. If everything went right for him at the 2018 World Cup, then Euro 2020 was a different matter entirely: just three shots on target (and no goals) in 390 minutes of football before he was thwarted by Switzerland goalkeeper Yann Sommer in a penalty shoot-out as France were eliminated in the first knock-out round.
In a vignette that reflected some of the turmoil within the France camp at that tournament, television footage caught midfielder Adrien Rabiot’s mother Veronique exchanging words with Mbappe’s father in the stands, saying the penalty miss was “embarrassing” and should bring him down a peg or two.
The fallout was worse than that. Mbappe received racist abuse on social media and was deeply unhappy that the French Football Federation didn’t show him more support.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated, he said he had told Noel Le Graet, the FFF’s then-president, “I cannot play for people who think I’m a monkey.” Ultimately he decided to continue playing for France “because it is a message to the young generation to say, ‘We are stronger than that.’”
There was also a death threat spray-painted on his mural in Bondy in January 2022, seemingly in response to a slight dip in PSG’s results. They still won Ligue 1 by a 15-point margin that season, with Mbappe scoring 39 goals in all competitions. But, with European success still elusive, dissatisfaction is rarely far from the surface.
At times in recent years PSG has resembled a circus — or at very least a soap opera. Mbappe has called it a “divisive club” that “can attract gossip”.
He flourished alongside Neymar for a time, but the longer they spent in the same forward line and the same dressing room, the more difficult their relationship became. Messi’s arrival in 2021 was an extra complication, on the field and off it.
Mbappe’s relationship with PSG has been strained. There has been a long-running dispute over the club’s use of his image for commercial gain. “PSG is a big club and a big family,” he said last year, irked that an interview with him had been used as a voiceover in video to promote season tickets. “But it is certainly not Kylian Saint-Germain.”
At times it looks that way. The enormous new contract he signed in 2022, to stay at PSG for another two years, gave him a voice to be heard by the club hierarchy when discussing football strategy. The appointment as sporting director of Campos, who backed him at Monaco, was seen as a nod to the club’s star player — though Mbappe has maintained he “will not go above the role of a footballer”.
On and off the pitch, Mbappe became the dominant personality in a team that also included Messi, Neymar and Sergio Ramos. He was scoring goals by the bucketload and earning huge sums of money in a trophy-winning team in a city he loves. But PSG couldn’t keep him happy.
To borrow a line from U2, they gave him everything he ever wanted. It wasn’t what he wanted.
It was a surprise — not least to Real Madrid — when Mbappe extended his contract at PSG in May 2022.
He had allowed his deal to run down to the final weeks, surely the prelude to a move to Spain. But no, he and his entourage spurned Madrid’s advances once again to stay with PSG, a two-year contract with the option (his option) to extend to June 2025.
The French club’s hierarchy made great play of his new contract, parading him around the Parc des Princes wearing a shirt with “Mbappe 2025” on the back.
But the following summer Mbappe informed the PSG leadership he would not be renewing his deal to 2025, let alone beyond. That put the club in a situation where, unless they cashed in on him immediately, they were at risk of losing him on a free transfer at the end of this season.
PSG were willing to sell him to Madrid for the right price. But matters were complicated when Al Hilal offered a world-record €300m (£259m, $332m) transfer fee to try to take him to Saudi Arabia and, on top of that, a reported €1million-a-week salary.
PSG accepted the transfer bid, but Mbappe said he was not willing even to discuss the transfer — his heart and mind set, seemingly, on joining Real Madrid as a free agent this summer.
He began the new campaign as persona non grata at PSG, omitted from the club’s pre-season tour of Japan and South Korea and again when the Ligue 1 programme began against Lorient. But he was then reinstated to the squad — the club accepting the futility of a stand-off — and embarked on what has so far been his most prolific season at PSG, averaging more than a goal a game.
But the longer he has stayed at PSG, the more he has looked like a player ready for a new challenge. He spoke last summer of PSG having hit a “glass ceiling” in the Champions League — beaten once in the final, once in the semi-final and four times in the round of 16 since he joined the club — but perhaps something similar could be said of his own career. As well as winning the Ligue 1 title six times (once at Monaco), he has been the league’s player of the year in four of the past five seasons and leading scorer in each of the last five.
It comes back to something which, according to “Je M’Appelle Kylian Mbappe”, his mother said when he was weighing up whether to join PSG or Madrid in the summer of 2017: “You’re a genius at football, Kylian. Aren’t you going to be bored in Ligue 1?”
Bored is the wrong word. But the dream has always been Real Madrid.
He will likely be moving to Spain at the age of 25, a little later than he had sometimes hoped but entirely in keeping with the career path he outlined as a child: first Clairefontaine, then Ligue 1, then Real Madrid.
It was similar with Cristiano Ronaldo when he, aged 24, moved there in 2009. It had seemed like Ronaldo’s destiny for two or three years before that — every summer a drawn-out transfer saga — but the timing was perfect. He had already won his first Champions League title and Ballon d’Or at Manchester United, but it was in Madrid that he joined the ranks of the sport’s immortals, a nine-year spell in which he scored 450 goals, becoming the club’s all-time top scorer, and winning both the Champions League and Ballon d’Or on another four occasions.
Campos sees parallels between the two. “They are the same,” he said. “They are born to be champions, to be stars, to win the most beautiful things.”
He told France Football as far back as 2018 that Mbappe “at 60 per cent (of his potential) is already one of the best in the world. Imagine him at 100 per cent. You imagine. He will be amazing.”
Even now, there is still a feeling that Mbappe has another level he can reach when he surely lands in Madrid: the way Ronaldo did, the way Jude Bellingham has done since his arrival from Borussia Dortmund last summer.
Not every world-class player has what it takes to thrive at the Bernabeu and to live with the intensity of a spotlight that turns footballers into superstars.
But it is the spotlight Mbappe has craved his whole life since looking up at his bedroom walls and wanting to emulate Ronaldo — and become not just a great footballer but the leader and the face of a new sporting generation.
