In a wonderful World Cup lent colour and majesty by Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Vinicius Junior, it takes something special to rise above. Currently Kylian Mbappe has the view from the top of football’s mountain.
The boy with the big smile who scored a hat-trick in the final four years ago and still lost has come to America to win. Again.
He has one World Cup winner’s medal, lest we forget. He was only 19 when he scored in France’s Moscow destruction of Croatia in the 2018 final.
But that was a version of Mbappe still in development. That was the prototype. Now – eight years and another final later – Mbappe is the complete killing machine, a forward so unplayable and unstoppable that he would appear on the brink of new levels of greatness.
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On Tuesday in New Jersey, Mbappe produced perhaps the performance of his life. Substituted – to the certain relief of Graham Potter’s emasculated Swedes – with five minutes remaining, his coach Didier Deschamps greeted him with a theatrical bow fit for Broadway.
It was a wonderful moment. Maybe there should have been bouquets from the orchestra pit, too. This was an actor leaving a stage that he had held comprehensively in his thrall from the first whistle on a sun-drenched afternoon on America’s east coast.
Two more goals. He has six to his name already in this Mondial. He has now scored 10 goals in World Cup knockout games and that is a record.
But this is not about numbers. They do not tell his story. This is about beauty and inevitability and certainty. It’s about a lack of mercy and it’s about conviction.
Mbappe has now entered that state of sweet sporting purity where the body makes decisions before the mind is even engaged, where everything that could happen will happen. His goals in America have been delivered with an assuredness completely unknown and unfelt for most of those who try.
France boss Didier Deschamps delivered a theatrical bow as Mbappe came off against Sweden
When he struck the post with the score at 0-0 at the MetLife, the world blinked. It was a mistake. He hasn’t made many out here. The one person who didn’t look remotely fazed by it was he who has carried the burden of pressure all his sporting life, with PSG and now at Real Madrid and, of course, in that beautiful deep blue of his country.
World Cups are made for performances like these. We don’t always get them. Here across the Atlantic we have been blessed with so many they have come at us like speeding cars on the freeway. We are lucky.
Messi, Haaland, Vini Junior and Mbappe have scored 21 goals between them out here and we are only just moving into July. But with two and a half weeks of footballing jeopardy ahead of us, the beating heart of yet another beguiling French team stands alone in terms of star quality.
On ITV last night, Gary Neville – not an analyst prone to overstatement of exaggeration – compared Mbappe to the great Brazilian forward Ronaldo.
‘He is on the verge of greatness,’ said the former Manchester United and England defender.
On the verge? What, we ask, is left for Mbappe to do?
He already has a World Cup winner’s medal and a hat-trick in a final. I had the good fortune to be at both of those games. I recall writing about him on both occasions. Even in defeat, he was impossible to ignore.
Lionel Messi and Mbappe are now tied on six goals each for the tournament as the race for the Golden Boot hots up
We used to talk about his pace and with good reason. Few, if any, are quicker. But the Mbappe writing his name right through this fabulous tournament is no mere road runner. He now carries the confidence of the complete wide forward.
If France continue on their path of destruction, Mbappe may yet play four more games in this tournament. He scored eight times in 2022, the same number as Ronaldo had in Japan and Korea 20 years earlier.
He may top those numbers here and this is the rarified air Mbappe now breathes. He is now in a vein of form that makes one wonder not if he will score but when and indeed how.
As we push deeper into World Cup 2026, we should perhaps ask not where he sits among his peers but among the very best we have ever seen.
