Statesman, comedian and dealer of hard truths: how Kylian Mbappé became the king of this World Cup

Kylian Mbappé is already his country’s all-time leading scorer. Photograph: Image Photo Agency/Getty Images This has been the World Cup of characters, bold fashion statements, and bantz: we’ve had Thomas Tuchel rubber-banding around the England dressing room like a teen at his first all-ages rave, and Iván Barton booting Miguel Almirón from the field as if sentencing him to death . Mauricio Pochettino and his $500 overshirt have brought fresh energy and inspiration to the wardrobes of convex middle-aged men the world over. Jokester Javier Aguirre’s avuncular “ fuck you ” at Anthony Gordon has pushed bilateral relations between Mexico and England to their warmest point since the British-brokered peace that ended the Pastry War of 1839. Erling Haaland has shown it’s possible to be Jaws in front of goal and Scooby Doo once the ball is in the back of the net, that there’s nothing about football so important that it can’t make way for some silly bit of online comedy. Even Harry Kane, a man who often seems like he was media trained in the womb, has squeaked thrillingly, if briefly , to life. Related: Every World Cup needs a cult hero: 2026 has given us touchline dreamboat Sebastián Beccacece And then, of course, there’s the player who lords over it all, the man whose mastery of his own game, temperament, and speech is as serene as his arms, in celebration of a goal, are folded. People have been making fun of Kylian Mbappé since he was a kid, and he’s been having the last laugh almost as long. As a three-year-old growing up in the Parisian banlieue , Mbappé would sing the Marseillaise with hand on heart , and draw indulgent giggles whenever he announced – as he would often – that he was destined to play for France; he’s now the leading goalscorer in French football history. His parents’ friends once bought him a model of the Bernabéu in teasing response to his claims that he would play for Real Madrid; he’s now Madrid’s most important player. On Saturday, Mbappé spent the final minutes of a bruising last-16 encounter against Paraguay, in which he scored the decisive penalty, sauntering around the pitch with a big, stupid smile on his face. Wherever this man treads in the world of football, the result is always the same: Mbappé wins. And he’s laughing ! By this point, we’re all familiar with the qualities that make Mbappé such an irrepressible force on the field: the whistling speed, the bulldog power, the footwork so magnetic it seems to generate its own weather. In French they call every top player a “crack,” and no one fits the onomatopoeia better than Mbappé. Lean and savage, he is the whip personified, a man so fast he’s already outrun one of his own surnames: once Mbappé Lottin, now he is simply Mbappé. The past four weeks have extended and deepened our appreciation of these talents. Referee view, the technological innovation that has exposed spectators to a thousand different varieties of male forearm hair, has allowed us to understand the degree to which the speed and violence of Mbappé’s game also come with a kind of pickpocketing nonchalance , how every demonstration of strength is simultaneously an expression of the most feathery mercy. Mbappé’s kills are nothing if not quick: he’s the cat and the raptor, the fox and the mongoose. At this World Cup Mbappé has transformed from the complete footballing package into a total cultural product, his supremacy off the field equaling his majesty on it. The dictator memes got going in earnest on the eve of the tournament, and have only accelerated since; they are now so pervasive that Didier Deschamps felt the need to point out that his captain is not in fact a despot, but a player who is loved and cherished by his teammates. Deschamps doesn’t strike me as the funniest man at work in France today, so it’s no surprise he’s missed that the Mobutu comparisons – gleefully embraced by Mbappé’s own teammates – burnish rather than hurt the great on-field generalissimo’s reputation. To become a source text online is modern culture’s highest compliment; to be memed is to be godly. The great players who’ve come before Mbappé – Messi, Ronaldo, even Zidane – were simply too tepid to warrant this treatment. Kyks Baps is the leader of a new generation so bursting with personality and life that it has finally given the world’s online pranksters something to work with. And he is much more than that, of course – so much more. French footballing culture values verbal excellence as highly as the stepover, the nutmeg, and the roulette; this is a country, after all, that gathers the professional football academies together for an annual eloquence competition at the presidential palace. Mbappé, who was staging his own dummy press conferences from the age of five, has always been one of the sport’s great talkers. But at this tournament he has reached new heights, his thoughts and ex tempore impressions on everything from football’s stylistic evolution (“It’s always the team that wins that is right”) to his teammates’ “ liberation of space ” and the ever-vexing question of hydration breaks (“ Don’t ask players for their opinion, we’re like weather vanes ”) bursting forth from that aerodynamic bobsled of a head with skiddy, urgent authority. He’s also been steadfast in his defense of Deschamps, who remains a curiously divisive figure in France despite all his success – memorably describing his coach as a joker, a friend, and a “disciplinarian dad” all at once. For a player guided by destiny, Mbappé has always had an unusually keen sense of his own ridiculousness. As a teenager, after his classmates made fun of the top he wore to school, he showed up the next day in flared jeans and velcro running shoes (not the kind of thing one wore as an aspirationally fashionable teen in Paris in the early 2010s), expanding the joke so that he too could be in on the fun. “Je suis beau, madame?” he asked his French teacher as he posed in his flares. Am I beautiful? At a press conference during the European Championships in 2024, having sparked controversy in France with his call to vote against the extreme right in that year’s legislative elections, Mbappé fielded a question from a reporter who identified himself as sitting to the player’s “extreme left.” Without missing a beat, Mbappé replied : “Good thing you weren’t on the other side.” Rarely if ever has football seen a player who’s this aware of his own press, or this prepared to embrace his own capacity for polarization. If Michael Jordan lived by the rule that “Republicans buy sneakers too”, Mbappé appears quite happy with a world in which acolytes of the far right go shoeless. It’s perhaps no surprise, at this World Cup, that Mbappé’s most forceful public intervention has been a volcanic denunciation of the Paraguayan senator who launched a racist attack against him after her country’s defeat to Les Bleus in the round of 16. “Madame Celeste Amarilla, you are a despicable woman”, Mbappe’s statement began ; “I will never allow people like her the freedom to spread their hatred and racism across the world,” it ended, with a satisfying clank. After years of dreary neutrality and deflection among the global sporting elite, Mbappé’s refreshing embrace of political combat feels like emerging into a new geological era. The Ronaldocene is over; the Mbappécene begins. The deeply felt sense of principle, the unabashed intellectualism, the attention to the importance of words amid the ongoing mastery of gestures: what forces, exactly, have combined to construct this remarkable personality, to make the myth of Mbappé? “It’s a question of education”, the man himself once said. Mbappé was, by all accounts, a restless child, but his parents did everything in their means to give him the tools to control his superabundance of energy: he had a dedicated psychologist from the seventh grade, there were flute and theatre lessons, and then of course there was football too. The family home in Bondy, a suburb of northeastern Paris, was a block away from the Stade Léo-Lagrange, a small but well equipped municipal football stadium. This World Cup began with 56 players from Paris – more than from any other city on Earth. There’s been much discussion over the past few weeks about the banlieue – the extramural belt in which the vast majority of Paris’s 13 million residents live, and from which virtually all of its great footballers have emerged. Bondy is the chernozem of modern French football; Mbappé’s teammate William Saliba also grew up in the neighborhood, as did many other professional footballers past and present. What is it that has made the banlieue parisienne such a formidable factory of footballing talent: is it density, public subsidization of sport, the design of social housing, the size of the pitches, the often fractious chemistry between migrant communities and mainstream French culture? It’s all of these, probably, but Bondy reveals another aspect of this urban biome that’s worth paying attention to. Within walking distance of the stadium where Mbappé became a footballer, amid the discount home goods stores and the drab prefabricated apartment blocks and the many football fields, you will find a whimsical public housing development whose cylindrical towers are all clad in brightly glazed tile. It is a swooping Oscar Niemeyer-designed Brutalist masterpiece that serves as the local bourse du travail , a center for mutual aid and worker organization; and a public swimming center named after Belgian singer Jacques Brel. Nothing better captures the constraining promise of the French banlieue , its strange power as a laboratory of footballing talent, than this one square mile grid of monotony, amenity, solidarity, and ambition. And at the center of it all, gathering together disparate threads of French culture, embodying the best of his country’s self-critical and sporting traditions, stands Mbappé. He’s a statesman and a comedian, a wellspring of memes and a dealer of hard truths, the sport’s highest moral authority and its trustiest punchline. He’s a footballer, he’s a flautist, he’s a thespian. And he is charging into World Cup history with the imperial calm of a man who has understood his own direction from the first murmurs of consciousness. Arise, King Kylian: Napoleon may have had to crown himself, but there’s no question on whose head football’s jewelry of state lies today.