Kylian Mbappe’s selfish attitude is erasing the goodwill the young superstar should have

A number of his teammates did so; it doesn’t take much to thank your supporters for going nuts over 90-plus minutes of feverish acclaim. Not Neymar – he skipped off down the tunnel. Is it that galacticos are spared such exertions? But if there was ever a day for Mbappe to salute his crowd, to show where his heart and loyalty and thus his future lay, this was it. Yet he was gone too.

It was strange to watch this preposterous piece of football transfer news play itself out on Tuesday. By early afternoon, multiple sports news channels were confirming that Mbappe wanted to leave the club to which, 143 days earlier, he had pledged his next three seasons.

By the aftermath of the Benfica match, the story had fast-forwarded so far that BT Sport’s Champions League coverage was deep in chin-stroking punditry about which club he would go to next. Then, a few minutes later, Christophe Galtier, the PSG coach, was winding us back again in his post-match press conference, saying that it was all a rumour. “I know nothing,” he said. “I just know that a rumour has become information, and information has almost become a statement.”

His primary role, Galtier explained, had been to prevent the rumour from “perturbing” his team before such an important fixture. He suggested, therefore, that he hadn’t spoken to Mbappe about it. Really?

Galtier also said that Mbappe, in the match, had been “the most dangerous player”. Indeed he had. His pace from a standing start had the beating of every defender; when he drove at them, the threat was instant.

The 23-year-old also converted a penalty and, Galtier said, “could have scored a second goal”, but his brilliant volley into the top left-hand corner was ruled out for off-side.

All this, Galtier argued, was evidence that this Mbappe was no different to normal, and judging by the body language he had a point. When Mbappe ran out for the warm-up, he did not look as if it was against his will (would he ever have been that foolish?). Indeed, he stuck with Neymar – laughing and joking – which may have been absolutely genuine but may also have been a message: look, here I am in perfect harmony with the one single player I am reported to have fallen out with.

There was nothing unprofessional about his conduct. Yet no one was buying it. The L’Equipe front page headline yesterday (Wednesday) was “Le Point de Rupture” – breaking point. Le Parisien: “Reasons for the divorce”. L’Equipe, again: “Mbappe: the spleen of Paris”. Emmanuel Petit, the World Cup winner turned pundit, was on TV, telling Mbappe to “grow up”.

You can measure out a football career in goals, and Mbappe has scored more at this point of this season (12 in 13 games) than he did the previous one, which suggests it isn’t all quite so disastrous. Or you can measure it in established yardsticks, such as World Cups, and ask what happened to the dazzling 19-year-old, the game’s brightest new superstar who found he had the world at his feet in Russia 2018. How he indulged us. Is it really so that, only four years on, on the eve of Qatar, he expects the world to indulge him? Has Mbappe just become the back pages’ latest parable about the influences of fame and fortune?

Some of the more valuable reflections came from France’s last great striker, Thierry Henry, who used his own experiences. “I didn’t like to play out wide for Barca,” he said. “I hated it. But I did it for the team. There is one rule: if the boss asks you to do something, you do it, if it’s good for the team.” Petit said pretty much the same: “The club is more important than any one player.”

Mbappe would by no means be the first to regard the game through the prism of self: Nicolas Anelka, his compatriot, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang come quickly to mind.

The equivalent, for Mbappe, of Henry’s Barcelona “ordeal” is what is being termed the “pivot”. Mbappe doesn’t want to lead the line; he doesn’t want to be the “pivot” at the front of the PSG attack, playing with his back to goal and having his teammates running off him. His wish, as discussed with the club in the summer, is for another player to pivot, giving Mbappe freedom to flourish.

The language itself, here, feels desperately incorrect yet nevertheless accepted football vocabulary – this acknowledgment that the club have gone out of their way to give Mbappe what he wants. His demands were integral to the negotiations that persuaded him to shun the expected move to Real Madrid. In so doing, the cult of self, rather than team, appears to have blossomed. Galtier has been extraordinarily honest about the summer transfer dealings, possibly because he personally hadn’t made any of these pledges to Mbappe and also because he joined the club too late (succeeding Mauricio Pochettino in July) to influence the way it played the market. He acknowledges that the club had attempted, yet failed, to pander to Mbappe’s demands and buy him a No 9 to play off.

There is a slight irony here. On Tuesday night, the moments when Mbappe was pivoting were among PSG’s most dangerous. Yet the most ludicrous nonsense in all this is that you could scour the planet and fail to find a more creative pair to play off than Lionel Messi (who was absent with a calf injury) and Neymar. Who could possibly suggest that this wasn’t good enough for them? The answer, apparently, is our Frenchman. It even seems accepted wisdom in the French media that, when negotiating to re-sign with PSG in the summer, among Mbappe’s wishes was that the club would sell Neymar to bring in a pivoting No 9 in his stead.

PSG would not be the first constellation of galacticos in which some stars are more interested in who shines the brightest rather than how fabulous they all look together. Last season both Messi and Neymar were fairly dim. It has not gone unnoticed in Paris that it is this season, when they have both fully lit up again, that rather than celebrate the potential they may all fulfil together, Mbappe’s reaction is more: what about me?

The fact is that PSG were so scared of losing him they offered him anything he wanted. The problem here is directly related to sovereign state ownership. If you have everything and can give everything, then the product of your largesse, it appears, is a player who expects everything. And that is everything for himself rather than the team.

What happens next? Mbappe has it in his power to detonate PSG’s Champions League ambitions in the very season when it finally appeared that they might fulfil them. The best guess is that Mbappe won’t leave in January and this “rumour” will work instead to ensure that, in the transfer window, he is given what he asked for in the summer.

It seems inevitable that this will affect the World Cup too. In the recent international window, in a prelude to pivot-gate, Mbappe told the media how “happy” he was in the France team. “I have a lot more freedom here,” he said, specifically citing Olivier Giroud as his fully functioning pivot.

While the World Cup will be an escape from his troubles, it may also provide him with extra motivation to prove how effective he can be when a team is set up to meet his preference.

The opposite could also play out. History tells us how combustible a French World Cup team can be; throwing in an angry Mbappe could be like a stick of dynamite.

Again, where did that superstar of the 2018 World Cup go? Is it too much to hope that this year’s tournament will trigger the muscle memory that football is less about one person and more about the collective?

– The Times

Originally published as Kylian Mbappe’s selfish attitude is erasing the goodwill the young superstar should have