It’s hard to believe that we are just halfway through what is Kylian Mbappe’s second World Cup campaign. The Paris Saint-Germain star burst onto the scene four years ago in Russia as a 19-year-old with high expectation, and he delivered — scoring four times and assisting once to win the Young Player of the Tournament accolade, as France won their second World Cup.
Fast forward to today, a 23-year-old Mbappe is once again showing the entire world why he is one of the most highly-rated players in the game — scoring and assisting against Australia as Didier Deschamps’ men came back from a goal down to win 4-1, before bagging a brace as France beat 10th in the world Denmark to confirm their place in the last 16 with a game to spare.
Those strikes have taken the PSG star to seven World Cup goals already, seeing him overtake two of his French compatriots and absolute legends of the game — Thierry Henry (six) and Zinedine Zidane (five) — while he’s well on course to match or even better Jules Fontaine’s record of 13 goals for France at the World Cup. He did manage to score all of those goals at the one World Cup in 1958, and that’s a record Mbappe is unlikely to match.
With those three goals and one assist at this year’s tournament (at the time of writing), Mbappe is level with England’s Marcus Rashford in the race for the top scorer award in Qatar. However, he’s more favoured in the World Cup golden boot odds than the Manchester Unite forward and you would expect the Frenchman to be able to outscore Rashford down the stretch en route to his first of what could be several top scorer accolades at major tournaments for his country.
What’s interesting though is that there now seems to be a difference between the Mbappe we see at tournaments like World Cup for France and the one we often witness at club level for PSG.
He seems happier and more a part of the team with his country than he does in Paris — where there is often reported rifts between him and other players in the star-studded dressing room, most notably Neymar, as well as the board.
It’s definitely a kind of Mbappe that football fans can warm to more, smiling and getting on with his international teammates on the pitch as opposed to throwing strops when the aforementioned Neymar or even Lionel Messi don’t pass him the ball at the Parc des Princes — where he’s the highest-paid player on the planet.
The fantastic thing about Mbappe is that because he has already won the trophy, he can play the rest of the World Cups in his career without the pressure that has perhaps weighed down Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo throughout their playing days on the grandest stages of them all.
In four years’ time, when the World Cup ascends on Mexico, the United States and Canada — and Messi and Ronaldo are out of the question — it will be Mbappe’s time in the spotlight. He’s already writing his own story, and who knows, he could be a two-time world champion by 2026?
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