Birthday Brace for Mbappe

Kylian Mbappe is turning 25 today.  No-one can deny that he has achieved a great deal in those 25 years!  This year he has scored 16 goals in 15 games for Paris Saint-Germain

Today, he added 2 goals to his tally.

Ligue Un football is pretty entertaining.  I hung on to watch Toulouse play in Monaco, Mbappe’s former haunt (the picture above is my first wife at the end of the yacht club breakwater in Monaco in 1983).  Magri scored first for a relegation-threatemed Toulouse with a nice header in the sixth minute, Monaco equalized and then went ahead on the stroke of half-time.  And they hung on to win despite having Golovin sent off soon after the restart.

Kylian Mbappe Lottie scored two, with six other attempts on goal, in PSG’s 3-1 win over Metz in Ligue 1 today.

Mbappé was born in Paris and grew up in Bondy banlieue, with its working-class, mostly immigrant residents. His mother, Fayza Lamari, is of Algerian descent, and his father, Wilfried Mbappé, had immigrated from Cameroon. Wilfried was a coach and director for the local club AS Bondy, and his son joined the club’s youth teams at age six. Several years later, he was selected to train at Clairefontaine, France’s national academy for elite football players. He spent two years there, and a number of notable European clubs—among them Real Madrid, Arsenal, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG)—expressed an interest in signing him. In 2013, at age 14, he signed with Monaco.

When Mbappé made his debut with Monaco’s first team—on December 2, 2015—he was just a few weeks shy of his 17th birthday. He was at that time the youngest first-team player in the club’s history. (Thierry Henri had previously been the youngest.). Mbappé scored only one goal and saw limited playing time during the 2015–16 season. In 2016–17, however, he scored 15 goals, which tied him for fifth among Ligue 1 players, and AS Monaco captured the Ligue 1 title. Powered by Mbappé and teammate Radamel Falcao, the team defeated Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund in knockout matches as it advanced to the Champions League semifinals, where they lost to Juventus.

In August 2017 Mbappé moved to PSG, who also signed Neymar around the same time. Together they led PSG to three consecutive Ligue 1 titles (2017–18, 2018–19, and 2019–20). Mbappé was named the league’s Player of the Year in the 2018–19 season, when he scored 33 goals, the most in Ligue 1. He led the league in goals in each of the next three seasons, and he again earned Player of the Year honors in 2020–21, and 2021–22. In 2021 PSG signed Messi, and then featuring one of the most talented front lines in the history of football, won the Ligue 1 title in 2021–22. Mbappé subsequently agreed to a new contract that would keep him at PSG through 2025 and, reportedly, made him the world’s highest-paid football player. In 2022−23, for the fifth season in a row, Mbappé led Ligue 1 in goals scored, and he was again named Player of the Year as PSG also won another Ligue 1 championship.

Mbappé leads France’s national team. He played his first match with the French eam in 2017, and he soon emerged as one of its main scoring threats. During the 2018 World Cup, he became—at age 19—the youngest French player ever to score in World Cup competition. His goal gave France a 1–0 group-stage victory over Peru, and the French team advanced to the knockout stages of the tournament, where they eventually defeated Croatia 4–2 in the tournament’s final. Mbappé scored the last of his team’s goals, becoming the second teenager to score in a World Cup final. (Pele was the first, in 1958.) Mbappé received the Best Young Player award for his performance, which included scoring four goals in the final.

In 2021 Mbappé scored the winning goal for France in the final of the Nations League, defeating the once-mighty Spain. At the 2022 World Cup, he scored eight goals in seven matches, which won him the Golden Boo. In the final, he scored three goals and twice brought the French team from behind to tie Argentina, led by his PSG teammate Messi, but France ultimately lost on penalty kicks. With his three goals, Mbappé became the first player in history to have tallied four goals in the World Cup final. in the wake of the French team’s lacklustre performance in the run-up to the 2022 World Cup, Mbappé was subjected to racist abuse that made him consider leaving PSG. In the end, he decided to stay:

But after, I take the reflection with all the people who play around me and root for me, and I think it was not the good message to give up. Because I think I’m an example for everybody.…This is the new France.…It’s for that, that I didn’t give up the national team. Because it is a message to the young generation to say, ‘We are stronger than that!’