Why Kylian Mbappe needs this World Cup more than ever

The great players, the likes of Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona, have always had a way of moving with the ball that calls to mind the motion of a raindrop sliding down a pane of glass; winding, sinuous, guided by invisible contours. But Mbappe doesn’t move like water. Mbappe moves like light. He doesn’t so much seem to cover the distance between two points as collapse the concept of distance entirely. One instant he’s deep inside his own half, the next he’s inside the penalty area.

So it is with the distance between aspiration and accomplishment. At 15, as a player in the Monaco academy, Mbappe designed for a homework task a Time magazine cover featuring an image of himself, and among various straplines, the epithet “The best young player in the world”. Four years later, he was on the cover of the real Time magazine, indisputably the finest young player on the planet, scorer in a victorious World Cup final. In a flash, destiny had beamed him from the horizon of his ambition to the centre of the world’s attention.

There was something utterly unconstrained and uncontainable about the teenage Mbappe. He could literally do whatever he wanted on this stage, and did. He ran the length of the pitch. He shot the ball into the corner of the net from 30 yards. He performed a balletic drag backheel of breathtaking impudence, the sort of move you do for fun in training, to set up a chance for Olivier Giroud in the semi-final against Belgium. He high-fived a pitch invader from the Russian punk music group Pussy Riot, right in front of Vladimir Putin. He seemed impervious to the occasion and impelled only by his own instinct.

The year before the World Cup in Russia, Mbappe had joined Paris Saint-Germain on loan; in the summer of the tournament, the move became permanent. And since joining the world’s most lavishly chaotic club, Mbappe has behaved like a ray of light that enters a palace of mirrors; a restless zigzag of contradictions, dazzling yet trapped, illuminating only dust and decadence.

Numerically, his past 4 and a half years have been phenomenal: at club level, he has scored 169 goals in 193 games and collected three Ligue 1 trophies. But there has been no Ballon d’Or, no Champions League title, and for perhaps the first time you could argue that he is no longer even the world’s best young player, with Erling Haaland, 19 months his junior, jostling for that mantle.

Less tangibly, there is a sense of something unfulfilled. Although he has manifestly improved as a player, and accumulated goals like coins in a video game, nothing he has done since then has been quite as memorable or magnificent. Mbappe is an incredible footballer, touched by genius, but his team have neither the artistry that sets talent to music, nor the adversity that lends them a heroic backdrop.

And then there’s Mbappe himself, the person and the persona. We know him better now, and perhaps not for the best. We have seen him slow down and throw his hands up in sullen protest at not receiving a pass, flirt with a move to Real Madrid and then back out, criticise his head coach on Instagram and fall out bitterly and spectacularly with his teammates for club and country. There was a clean, zingy energy about the Mbappe who announced himself to the world; an electricity, a light. This Mbappe seems mixed up in a world much murkier, surrounded by gas, smoke and hot air.

When he burst on to the scene, Mbappe embodied everything we love about this sport: its capacity to uplift young people and reveal greatness, the thrill of watching a player pushing at the frontiers of their own ability and meeting only clear air. Now he exhibits many of the traits of modern football that leave us cold: the petulance, the egotism, the private jets, the disloyalty to team and teammates, the way that some players are orbited by an entourage and an industry unto themselves.

Four years ago, the World Cup needed Mbappe. It needed that jolt of life, that infusion of pure, uncut stardom. Now, as the 2022 tournament in Qatar hoves into view, it feels more as if Mbappe needs the World Cup and its aura, its mythology, its way of clarifying things. Can the player we all fell in love with be revealed again? Or is the golden boy tarnished for good?

The boy wonder

The French striker Valere Germain first encountered Mbappe in pre-season training for Monaco’s 2016-17 campaign. Mbappe, then 17, had made a handful of appearances the previous season, when Germain had been on loan at Nice, and he had already heard talk of the teenager’s extraordinary talent.

“From the first session, I could see he had qualities that were abnormal,” Germain says. “He had self-confidence, which you don’t always see in players at that age. It’s easy to just stay in your lane, but he had no qualms about showing what he was capable of.”

Mbappe’s ascent was steep. He spent the first half of that season mainly as an impact substitute. In the spring, he overtook Germain as the first-choice partner for Radamel Falcao, and scored six goals in six games in the Champions League knockouts, and 12 in the last 15 games as Monaco stormed to the Ligue 1 title. The next campaign he won his second French title, at PSG, scoring 13 goals and another four in the Champions League. Then he went to the World Cup.

Mbappe’s personal qualities were almost as impressive as his athletic gifts. He was charming. He spoke multiple languages. He held press conferences in the palm of his hand. He donated his World Cup earnings to a charity for handicapped children. Heck, he could even play the flute. “It feels like God sent us this boy to teach us how to play and how to behave,” Arsene Wenger wrote.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mbappe, though, was the way that he received his sudden super-fame like a Paul Pogba through-ball: in his stride. “I think his brain and his personality was programmed from the earliest possible age [for stardom],” Germain says.

“He was prepared for every aspect of the life he lives,” says Vincent Duluc, the chief football writer for L’Equipe. “He has known for a long time that all this was going to happen to him.” He points out that after winning the 1998 World Cup, Thierry Henry was recalled to the France under-21 team for 18 months. “He needed time to digest it all. Mbappe had no need to digest it because he had already prepared for it.”

The public perception of Mbappe was hugely positive. After all, he embodied one of the most beloved stories in sport: the boy wonder. That framing – the kid channelling the sacred whisper of inspiration – conferred a certain artless simplicity. But in ways various and subtle, Mbappe was already shaping his own story. An example: in the minutes after France won the World Cup, Pele tweeted to congratulate him, with the words: “Welcome to the club, it’s great to have some company.” This reinforced the sense that we had just been witness to epochal greatness. In fact, it is believed one of Mbappe’s sponsors was behind the tweet.

No harm in that, of course. But perhaps our first real acquaintance with Mbappe’s hard-nosed entrepreneurial side came when the negotiation details of his first contract at PSG were leaked in November 2018 by Der Spiegel. They revealed that Mbappe had demanded (but not been granted) a euros 500,000 (then about pounds 435,000) bonus should he win the Ballon d’Or, compensation should PSG be banned from the Champions League for breaching Financial Fair Play rules, and 50 hours of private aircraft use per year. “There’s a certain whiplash,” Duluc says, “which happens when you go from that breakthrough moment where the whole world thinks you’re amazing, to being part of the furniture, when people begin to see your faults.”

Sometimes, when you’re a great sportsperson, the world just wants you to shut up and dribble. It wants to luxuriate vicariously in the exercise of your athletic gift, to linger on that moment that a player achieves at the zenith of their art, of divine weightlessness. But Mbappe wants to exert a gravity. He wants not simply to live his dream, but to leverage it. And he was never going to be content to stay in his lane.

A man, a plan, a brand

“I want to be more than just the guy who shoots the ball and goes to his yacht and takes his money,” Mbappe told the New York Times this year. When you have known since boyhood that the life of a superstar awaits you, you’ve had a lot of time to consider how you would like to use it. In Mbappe’s case, he has followed through on a vision in which he is not simply a brilliant footballer, but a transcendent athlete, who uses his fame to pursue higher causes.

He has a charitable foundation, inaugurated a month after he turned 21, which aims to help 98 children from the greater Paris area realise their dreams in fields such as medicine and mathematics.

He has an armada of closely tended commercial partnerships, including with Nike, Electronic Arts, Hublot, Panini and the NFT company Sorare. He has also set up a production company called Zebra Valley, based in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on multicultural and youth-facing content. It is not dissimilar in focus to SpringHill, the entertainment firm founded by LeBron James, the basketball star who counts Mbappe as a confidant. In June, Zebra Valley inked a multi-year deal with the NBA.

Mbappe’s cultivation of himself as a global brand cuts two ways. It is rooted in an awareness of his own power and of his own image. He is conscious of how he may change the world, but also of how the world perceives him. This duality was expressed by the recent farrago involving Mbappe and the image rights of the France team.

In September, Mbappe recused himself from a promotional photoshoot organised by the French Football Federation, having apparently baulked at being associated with KFC and BetClic, a French gambling website, both sponsors of Les Bleus. He then extracted concessions from the federation. “When Mbappe first refused to sign, the other [players] saw it as an egotistical step,” Duluc says. “[But] once he explained to them what was going on, what they could have and why, the others said, ‘OK, we’re with you,’ and all of a sudden it became a collective act.”

Mbappe’s friendship with James is not coincidental. James was the original game-changer, the man whose decision to turn his move from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat into a spectacle of self-determination woke other basketball players up to their own power. James realised two things: that the influence of a superstar athlete was a latent force, waiting to be unleashed, and that his professional destiny was too important to be left to the whims of men in suits. When you have become used to running your life like a chief executive, it’s hard to sit back and be a biddable, obedient team player in the arena of your career.

Here things have got a little sticky for Mbappe, whose attempts to wield his own power at a dysfunctional club have been understandable but unendearing. He is believed to have played a role in the appointment of Luis Campos as PSG’s sporting director. He has openly questioned the tactics of the head coach, Christophe Galtier, this season, bemoaning that he doesn’t get to play with a “pivot” striker. He has reportedly demanded a wider cultural reset, including the excommunication of Neymar and the introduction of a younger, pressier squad, with him at its centre. (Mbappe quote-tweeted an article reporting this with the word ‘FAKE’, and has said of Neymar: “I respect the player and the man and admire what he is.")

The paradox of Mbappe is also his predicament: he seems to crave above all a statesmanlike remove, freedom from the ancillary tasks that dilute his power and purpose, a world constructed so that he can focus on doing what he was born to do. And yet he cannot resist trying also to be the architect of that world. The brilliant forwards of the 1950s Argentina team were known as “the angels with dirty faces”. Mbappe is more like a prince with dirty hands.

“You have the sense that his public utterances are not so much those of a player as those of a director, and that makes him a little unpopular,” Duluc says. “He has such a mastery of all the codes, everything to do with image, that you wonder whether it’s just a passing phase, or whether he has just decided to play the game in places where others fear to tread.”

A divided nation

For Mbappe, PSG’s failure to win a Champions League title has been a bitter disappointment. Losing the Ligue 1 trophy to Lille in 2021 was a major embarrassment. But the hardest moment of his career was France’s elimination from Euro 2020 in the round of 16 against Switzerland, a match in which he missed the crucial penalty in the shootout. While far inferior players nervelessly dispatched their spot-kicks, Mbappe’s shot was saved.

Afterwards, it was widely but incorrectly reported that France’s players had failed to console Mbappe – I was there, and Pogba, Moussa Sissoko, Marcus Thuram and Lucas Digne all went over to him. Nonetheless, there were tensions between Mbappe and his teammates: he was so incensed by Giroud’s comment in a pre-tournament friendly that “sometimes I make runs and the balls aren’t forthcoming” that he had to be talked down from calling a retaliatory press conference.

Worse was to come, when Mbappe was racially abused on social media. At this point, he even considered quitting the France team. “I cannot play for people who think I’m a monkey,” he told Noel Le Graet, the FFF president. He was left disappointed by Le Graet’s response: “He concluded there had been no racism,” Mbappe said.

Mbappe grew up in Bondy, in the northern belt of the Parisian banlieues, a ring of working-class suburbs with rising tower blocks and high unemployment, but with municipal sports facilities that are often well-funded and maintained. During the 2005 Paris riots, an incandescent flare of anger against police brutality and scant opportunity, Bondy burnt. Police cars were torched and stations stoned. Nicolas Sarkozy, then the interior minister and future president, said he wanted to clean out the suburbs with a pressure hose. Helene Carrere d’Encausse, a famous historian, blamed the trouble on African families “with three of four wives and 25 children in one apartment”. Mbappe was six years old.

He would see the same patterns of inequity and injustice in the summer of 2020, when he called for justice for George Floyd, the African-American man murdered by a police officer. He also used his social media to draw attention to the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old boy who suffered grave facial injuries in an arrest in Bondy. “Here or elsewhere,” he wrote, “Police violence – it’s the same fight.”

Mbappe was born to a Cameroonian father, Wilfried, and an Algerian mother, Fayza, of Kabyle descent, the same origin as Zinedine Zidane’s parents. It’s tempting to imagine them on twin pedestals: the two heroes of France’s two World Cup triumphs, the two totems of a modern, multicultural France, the two banlieue boys who captured the stars on the blue jersey. But Mbappe and Zidane are very different. Zidane was a laconic figure, whose silence made him a symbol. Mbappe is more talkative, more eager to be a messenger, more aware of his power.

But he also exists in a more fragmented world. When France won the 1998 World Cup, Zidane’s face was projected on to the Arc de Triomphe; millions of people saw the same image, awesome and monolithic. Two decades later, when Mbappe appeared in the victory parade, he was filmed by a million smartphones, dispersed and disseminated through thousands of social media accounts, each adding their own gloss and agenda.

“Zidane managed to create unanimity, because he was timid – a huge character on the pitch, but as a person very humble,” Duluc says. “After 1998, he was an absolute hero. Mbappe instead reflects what France really is, which is a country still divided in two. No one manages to inspire unanimity [any more], and Mbappe is no exception.”

The jewel in the crown

In May, as Mbappe weighed the largest contract offer ever extended by Real, he received a call from Emmanuel Macron, the French president. Macron spoke with the weight of his office and the familiarity of a mate. He told Mbappe that he wanted him to remain at PSG, for the good of the nation. The idea that the conversation swayed Mbappe’s decision is probably a wishful piece of political stagecraft, but that it took place at all is remarkable enough.

Tariq Panja, the New York Times sports business reporter, likened Mbappe to one of France’s “national champion companies”, such as Airbus or Renault, which are integral to the mosaic of French identity. Even the player himself thinks in terms of his economic importance to the republic – one of the reasons he gave for choosing to remain at PSG in the summer was that he didn’t want to leave France for free. Yet despite this, the country that depends most on Mbappe may not be his own.

To understand Mbappe’s position, you must understand the position of Qatar. Literally: Qatar is a tiny peninsular country, the third-smallest by area in continental Asia. Its strategy of acquiring prime sporting real estate, according to Raphael Le Magoariec, a geopolitologist at the University of Tours, is not so much about image as gaining proximity to the powerful, and the security that comes with it. “They are looking for lifeboats of influence,” he says.

For all the brilliance of Messi and Neymar, Mbappe remains the most prized of Qatar’s collection of elite footballers, for two reasons. First, because he is a player still in his prime, and a brand still in bloom. His power lies in his future as well as his present. And second, because his origins in Bondy anchor PSG spiritually in the Paris area. His value to the club is reflected in the lengths they went to keep him from the clutches of Real.

And yet, the retention of Mbappe has not been universally popular. He was booed as he arrived at last month’s Ballon d’Or ceremony in Paris, which would once have been unimaginable. To some, Mbappe is a symbol of a starstruck strategy that has resulted in PSG missing out on the likes of Eduardo Camavinga and Aurelien Tchouameni and, worse, losing top players nurtured at their own academy such as Christopher Nkunku and Moussa Diaby.

Although PSG belatedly reversed course this summer, making several young signings in a departure from their bling-bling approach, Le Magoariec draws a parallel between the short-termism of their previous recruitment and the consumption which fuels their wealth.

“That is really a landmark problem for this club, which after all flows from hydrocarbons, petrol and gas,” he says. “They don’t know how to wait.”

The Time cover on which Mbappe appeared in 2018 garlanded him with the banner headline “Next Generation Leaders”. He seemed engaged with social issues and connected to the interests of young people. Yet unlike other Gen Z athletes, he has been noticeably quiet on the biggest issue facing his generation: climate change. Worse, in fact: when asked in September why PSG had made the short trip to a game against Nantes via private jet, he burst out laughing, then said he had no view on the matter. On the same day, Macron had encouraged French citizens to limit their use of air conditioning.

“For Qatar it’s important that Mbappe doesn’t get mixed up in too much politics, aside from the issue of racism,” Le Magoariec says. “He doesn’t really have much of a voice on other questions of a political nature.”

Last month, Le Parisien reported that Mbappe will receive a gross salary of euros 630 million (pounds 552 million) over the next three years of his contract, the biggest wage paid to an athlete. (PSG responded that the reports were “sensationalist” and “completely false”.)

“There’s nothing surprising about that, because Qatar invests in players like they would invest in fighter jets,” Le Magoariec says.

Where does that leave Mbappe? Is he a lifeboat or a fighter jet? He is both. He has the power to save, and to devastate. He is something to cling on to, and to fire shots with. He’s a small vessel of hope in a vast, borderless ocean full of sharks.

But he’s also a mighty piece of hardware for a country looking nervously over its shoulder.

The magic flute

The second World Cup of Mbappe’s career is charged with personal and political significance. For Mbappe, who for the past four years has known mostly frustration on the game’s legacy-defining stages, it is a chance to remind the world that he is an exceptional player, and to reaffirm his own sense of fabulous destiny. No man since Cafu and Ronaldo in 2002 has won a second world title, though neither was a first-choice player when Brazil won the tournament in 1994. Win and Mbappe would join them, at the age of 23. Win in a starring role and he would be the favourite for next year’s Ballon d’Or. Fail, flame out, and as Duluc says: “Perhaps we’ll ask ourselves whether he is a more ordinary player than we all thought.”

One thing seems certain: whatever happens, however France and Mbappe do, it won’t feel like the first time. Mbappe’s arrival in Russia felt like a gift to the global patrimony of football. Mbappe in Qatar will feel different: it is, on some level, the fulfilment of a duty, the culmination of an expensively acquired ambassadorship. The difference is roughly analogous to that between a comet and a firework display. Both can be spectacular. But one belongs inescapably to the theatre of control and staged might.

Perhaps Mbappe could never enchant us quite like he did in 2018, and perhaps that’s normal. Perhaps it’s simply part of the natural arc of celebrity that the more we know Mbappe, the more he exasperates us, especially those who have walked in his footsteps before. “He annoys everyone today,” Emmanuel Petit, the midfielder who scored in the 1998 final, said last month. “He makes it personal all the time. He even puts himself above the institution.”

Perhaps Petit is subtly mistaken. It’s not that Mbappe imagines himself above the institution. Maybe it’s that he imagines himself to be an institution. Why wouldn’t he? Presidents ring him, economies depend on his decisions, his production company signs deals with Hollywood studios, a hundred Parisian schoolchildren get a leg-up to their dreams through his generosity. Wouldn’t you too, in his shoes?

It’s not Mbappe’s fault that the world raises him to the height of a multinational corporation, then baulks when he looks clubs, leagues and governments in the eye. “It’s very difficult for Mbappe to be concentrated on his game – no one will let him do that,” Duluc says. “He is doing a different job from footballers 30 years ago – it’s not the same job.”

And after the World Cup – where does Mbappe go from there? So much of his career is still unwritten, and the knowledge that he has an almost unprecedented degree of authorship over it … well, that can be a liberation and a burden. One decision, though, seems likely to come into cold, hard focus: to remain at PSG or take his talents elsewhere? “That’s really what Qatar has to fear,” Le Magaoriec says. “It would be a blow to their legitimacy.” Sources close to PSG dispute this.

Mbappe is a global figure these days, enmeshed in a complicated matrix of power. But he is also still a young man, still the boy from Bondy, still the kid who learnt to play the flute. Now the sheet music is in front of him again. He knows these notes, the orchestra around him feels familiar. There is a moment all flautists know, when the rustles and whispers of the audience die away, and you are no longer aware of being watched. You’re simply letting the breath flow through you, until you feel yourself become the channel and the rush of air become song, and you know this is the sound you were born to make.

– The Times

Originally published as Why Kylian Mbappe needs this World Cup more than ever