A Country and Its Spearhead
On how one player symbolises a nation's ambition
Kylian Mbappé is hitting top speed. It is the eleventh minute of France’s quarter-final against Argentina at the 2018 World Cup. Mbappé has found a loose ball, in his half of the pitch, and taken off in a detonation. He flies through two defenders with one push of the ball, then past another—all elastic, antelopean strides, hands slicing the air. Before the mind can properly register his sprint, he has reached the penalty box. Marcos Rojo doesn’t bother with the ball; he takes Mbappé by the shoulder. Felling him was the only available option. Four minutes earlier, it had taken four defenders to bring him down. This time, France have a penalty.
We’d heard of Kylian Mbappé. We’d heard that he had broken into AS Monaco’s first team when he was sixteen. Sixteen year olds don’t play senior football, but Mbappé, the word went, was nothing like anything we’d known before. We’d then seen him twist Manchester City and Juventus in the Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain shelled out 180 million of their crispiest Qatar-kissed euros, making an eighteen-year-old the subject of the second-most expensive transfer in football history. That he was special was not up for debate, but how special remained to be seen.
And now, in the compressed heat of a World Cup knockout game, opposite Lionel Messi and Angel di Maria, Mbappe was leaving some of the world’s most experienced defenders flailing, grasping at thin air. There are moments when you know you’re watching someone ascend between planes. This was not another winger blessed with a lean body and fast-twitch fibres, or a forward with a thunderous shot. Mbappe had both those gifts, which he’d reveal generously over the following weeks, but he had that other, intangible quality that separates the elite from the rest: everyone was always catching up to him.
This crack of lightning, piercing through the Argentine defence, was an announcement of arrival.
**
Kylian Mbappe was born five months and eight days after the greatest night in French football history. Under an inky Paris sky and the shimmering floodlights of State de France, France beat Brazil 3-0 to win their first Men’s World Cup. One of thirteen participants of the inaugural World Cup in 1930, hosts in 1938, France had waited an eternity for this moment.
French football was considered European royalty in the mid-eighties. Carried by Michel Platini’s genius, France won the European Championships in 1984 and reached the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup. They also won gold at the Los Angeles Olympics. And just when they should’ve taken the next leap towards greatness, they fell on a series of trapdoors, failing to qualify for the next European Championship and the next two World Cups.
The home World Cup came as respite and an opportunity to reclaim some of the lost lustre. Still, success meant quarter-finals, or, at best, the semi-finals. France weren’t yet ready to take on the heavyweights. They crossed all those hurdles, but the elation from reaching the final was broken by fear: they’d have to face Brazil—the defending champions; a lineup of Ronaldo and Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos and Cafu and Bebeto; the country that produced Pele, Garrincha, and Rivelino; the country where football went mud-caked and came out looking resplendent.
France did not let Brazil enter the match. The 3-0 final score was fitting for France’s dominance, and equally charitable to Brazil. Later that evening, the limestone beams of the Arc de Triomphe were lit up with the face of a new national hero: Zinedine Zidane. Usually the creative pulse of the side, Zidane had scored twice in the final and put the game past Brazil’s reach.
To have watched Zidane play is to have seen football turn into ballet. He glided through grass, whether running towards or with the ball. He was loose, able to stop, turn, or slide through spaces. Defenders running full speed into a tackle were forced to apply emergency brakes, and then change directions and chase him at full speed. But, for all that languidity, he was never late to a ball or a tackle. The ball, whenever it came to him, stopped dead at his feet, like a stress ball landing on velvet. Everyone else sought to control the ball; the ball, itself, came to Zidane’s feet to be loved. He’d do with a touch—a pat from the back of his heel, a gentle caress from his sidestep—what most needed a kick for.
Football had many players with rare gifts, but Zidane was the one you watched even when he did not have the ball. He was so mesmerising a creation that two movie directors set up seventeen cameras to follow him for an entire game, and then turned the footage into a feature film. On sensory experience, Zidane was the successor to Mark Knopfler and the precursor to Roger Federer.
Zidane represented something else France had long wanted to claim. He was born to Algerian parents in La Castellane, a residential suburb along the northern edge of Marseille. His father had moved from Algeria in 1953—the year before the war of independence.
France was flourishing at the time. The prosperity of the post-war years brought industry, which brought factories and construction sites. And that brought with it a problem: labour. So France opened their ports. The immigrants came, en masse, from Algeria and Morocco, Senegal and Mali. The state built housing for them on the outskirts of the major cities, and gave those districts a collective noun: banlieues.
The 1998 World Cup-winning team was called Black, Blanc, Beur—black, white, Arab—a wordplay on the tricolour’s Bleu, Blanc, Rouge. Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, had won France the final; Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, had scored both goals in the semi-final. Around them were Patrick Vieira, Theirry Henry, Marcel Desailly. The team was visibly, undeniably, a product of the banlieues.
The French received them with a long, warm embrace. But the story, manifesting over one glorious summer, had a tension simmering underneath. A significant chunk of the republic wanted the immigrants to shed their language, culture, and faith, and wear traditional French garb. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a politician who had previously called the national team a collection of players from foreign countries, reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.
Three years after that, in October 2005, two teenagers—Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré—were electrocuted in a power substation in Seine-Saint-Denis, while hiding from a police check. Twenty-one days of riots followed. Nearly nine thousand cars were burned across France. The government declared a state of emergency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, surveying the burning suburbs, called the rioters racaille—scum. When France imploded, in shameful flames, at the 2010 World Cup, Minister Roselyne Bachelot referred to players of colour as “immature banlieue criminals.”1
Seine-Saint-Denis was and is the poorest department in metropolitan France. More than a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. Youth unemployment in some of its communes runs past thirty percent. It is eleven miles from the centre of Paris; in some parts, you cannot reach it by metro at all.
**
Bondy is in Seine-Saint-Denis. It was here that Kylian Mbappé was born, to Wilfried and Fayza—Cameroonian and Algerian. Wilfried was the coach and director at AS Bondy, the local football team; Fayza was a professional handball player. Kylian was six years old during the 2005 riots.
He wanted only football. He’d watch hours without break and sleep with a ball for a pillow. By the time he was six, he was enrolled at AS Bondy. Antonio Ricardi, the under-13s coach at AS Bondy, told the BBC, “Kylian would always think about football, always talk about football, always watch football - and if he wasn’t doing that he’d be playing football games on the PlayStation.”
Ricardi also understood, quickly, that he had stumbled onto something rare. “Kylian could do much more than the other children,” he said. “His dribbling was already fantastic and he was much faster than the others.” When Kylian was eleven, his talent and reputation quickly outgrowing Bondy, he was taken to Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine—an academy nestled inside the lush woods of the Rambouillet forest.2
Every year, Clairefontaine trials the best young players in the Greater Paris region, and from there, about two dozen make it through. Then comes their point of difference. Unlike most academies in Europe, even the best ones—in Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Munich—Clairefontaine doesn’t mould young footballers for archetypical football roles. Its purpose, almost ideological, is to produce a complete, versatile footballer. The trainees are subject to two years of the most rigorous and methodical coaching, at the end of which they’re ready for any football, anywhere.
At Clairefontaine, Kylian learnt how to use his feet and body, how to move without the ball, and how to use the gift of speed he was born with.3 He was in his final year, a few hours away from turning fourteen, when his family got a call from Real Madrid. The club wanted to give Kylian a trial. So, the family flew down to Spain. Receiving young Kylian and crew at the airport, according to this report, was Zinedine Zidane—the past shaking hands with the future.
Wilfried and Fayza were impressed, but they believed it was too soon. In France, they reasoned, he would develop faster, the pathway from academy to a first team unencumbered by a royal team’s ambitions. They were right. At just sixteen, Kylian was walking out for AS Monaco.
**
By 2018, by the end of that quarter-final against Argentina, Kylian Mbappé had arrived. He scored twice that afternoon. Then he scored in the final—only the second teenager, the first since Pelé, to do so. He returned to Paris Saint-Germain colours and continued piling on the goals.
Four years later, he met Argentina again. Mbappé, by now, had become a phenom, technically and physically on a different plane to everyone else in the tournament. He had outgrown the club that had paid €180 million for him, and was now in a courtship with the sparkling white royalty of Real Madrid.
In the final, though, Mbappé was the forced antagonist. The match, and so much of the tournament, had been largely seen through Lionel Messi. This was perhaps Messi’s final shot at glory, one last chance to bury the accumulated heartbreaks of the previous decade. Argentina were 2-0 up at half-time.
In the French dressing room, Didier Deschamps—captain of the ‘98 World Cup winning side, coach now—was tearing into his team. The France team were listening, despondent, when Kylian rose: “It’s a World Cup final! We’re down by two goals. We can come back. Guys, this is every four years!”
The second half started, and more minutes went by. Argentina’s defence, built with muscle and trademark South American grit, smothered everything France could offer. They didn’t let Mbappé come near the goal. Then, with just over ten minutes remaining, France were awarded a penalty. Mbappé converted and entered the rare group of players to have scored in two World Cup finals—Zidane was one, Pelé another.
A couple of minutes later, as the average global heart-rate was rising into the 130s, Mbappé saw a lobbed pass on the left side of the box. Most would let it bounce, then either shoot or take a forward touch. Mbappé flung himself sideways, and while parallel to the ground, lashed his right leg at the ball—all in a blink. It was a perfectly-struck volley, and yet, utterly inexplicable in form and the speed of its execution. 2-2.
This is the moment where Mbappé’s stature became clear. Messi had spent sixteen years in an Argentine shirt pursuing that elusive, golden World Cup trophy. He was thirty-five, and this was almost certainly his last chance. And yet, watching Mbappé in those minutes, it felt wholly probable that a twenty-three-year-old was about to take it from him single-handedly. There are very few players in the history of football about whom such a thing could credibly be said.
The match went into extra time. Messi scored, Mbappé scored. With seconds to go, and both benches preparing for a penalty shoot-out, Mbappé found a loose ball in the penalty box, like the one he had found four years back, but this time within a shot’s distance from the goal. He twisted past one defender, wriggled past another, and uncoiled his right leg. If one were to extract the collective sound emanating from Argentina in that moment, it would be the Spanish version of, “Oh, fuck.” Somehow, perhaps by divine intervention, an Argentine leg came flying, and Mbappé’s shot was blocked.
The penalty shoot-out went Messi’s way and football’s most enduring romance of the 21st century finally got its just ending. Mbappé was the tournament’s highest scorer, and for long stretches, including the final, its most dominant player.
**
In the summer of 2024, Kylian Mbappé left Paris Saint-Germain on a free transfer and joined Real Madrid. His journey at PSG had been left unresolved. The club was renovated on the idea that assembling the most expensive players would produce the most successful team, with Mbappé as the centrepiece. There were seasons when the PSG frontline read: Mbappé, Messi, Neymar. The Champions League, the one trophy all that Qatari expenditure was underwritten for, never arrived.
Luis Enrique joined as coach in 2023, and immediately declared his ideology. Football, as he conceived it, was a collective enterprise, a system of interlocking commitments. Messi and Neymar had left by then. Mbappé, whose gifts were of the kind that bends systems toward itself, found himself, perhaps for the first time in his professional life, at the margins of a coach’s vision.
The year after he left, PSG won the Champions League, dismantling Internazionale 5-0 in the final. It was the most emphatic victory in the history of a major European final. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Mbappé scored 44 goals in his first season—more than any debutant in the club’s history. Real Madrid ended the season trophyless. Last night, in Budapest, PSG won their second consecutive Champions League title. Mbappé, for his part, scored 42 goals in 44 games in another barren season for Real Madrid.
There is a popular theory, now supported by evidence, that PSG have become a better team without the overarching shadow of Mbappé. And that Real Madrid, for all the individual production, are suffering from it.
The questions tailing him from Paris—about tension, discomfort, and misalignment—have become audible again. Mbappé wasn’t solely responsible, of course, but had a part to play in the strained relationship between Real Madrid and their new coach, Xabi Alonso, in the first few months of this season.
Football had been waiting, for some years, for the generation after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to produce a worthy successor. It’s no ordinary task. The mountains those two men built, through a combination of individual and collective glory, through a dominance so relentless every other player in the sport became a supporting character, cannot be scaled by just about anyone. Mbappé is the closest thing to either of them.
The World Cup comes at an apt moment. Kylian Mbappé will arrive in the United States this summer 27 years old, fully formed. He’ll be just about the same age as Zidane was in 1998. He’ll lead a French unit happy to orbit around his atmospheric talents. He’ll wear the captain’s armband on jersey number 10—Zidane’s number—and carry French pluralism and excellence along with him. Twelve of his teammates grew up in the banlieues; twelve play for Europe’s elite clubs, like Bayern Munich, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. The players France left out of their squad could probably finish third in this tournament.
If I were to stick my neck out for a prediction: Kylian Mbappé will receive the World Cup trophy on July 19th from, in all likelihood, Donald Trump. There are other great teams at the tournament, but none as stacked as France, none with a spearhead as sharp as Kylian Mbappé.
Netflix have released a docu-series on this tournament, called The Bus. Incredible watch.
The man who laid its groundwork was Ștefan Kovács, a Romanian-born Hungarian who had won two European Cups with Ajax and later managed the French national side—the only foreigner ever to do so. Kovács grew up inside Romanian communist sport, where individual skill was considered secondary to collaboration and versatility, and passed through tremendous rigour.
Awesome writing. You must have written a few spy thrillers in another lifetime. 😊
This is brilliant mate. Really loved the writing. Reminded me of everything I loved about that last tournament and the final, and why I’m looking forward to this one. Loved historical context too.