The prodigy had a role model close at hand. Wilfried and Fayza had come to the assistance of Congolese friends and provided shelter to Jirès Kembo Ekoko, a nine-year-old who had been sent from Kinshasa to France to escape a problematic family situation. Jirès, Kylian’s senior by more than a decade, was a promising winger who went straight from Bondy’s under-11s team to the Clairefontaine academy and progressed to France’s junior and Espoirs international team and later played for Rennes in Ligue 1. Kylian’s first treasured shirt was the one that the man he considers his “big brother” gave him after scoring two goals against Estonia in his first match for France Under-23s. As Mbappé would later put it in an animated film he made in 2020, Je m’appelle Kylian, whose first frames show him emerging into the world from the shell of a football-shaped egg, “I was born into football.” His parents grew up in Bondy: Wilfried, of Cameroonian origin, and Mbappé’s mother Fayza, of Algerian descent. Mixed marriages are common in the Parisian suburbs, the banlieues, but the couple did have to defy some local disapproval. As a young man of non-white origins, he has a particular vulnerability with the French public, one-third of whom voted for the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the run-off of the presidential elections in 2017. Even so, he has begun to speak out against police violence. Kylian Mbappé was 18 when he walked into the changing room of the French national team. “It’s very difficult,” he recalls, “because great players don’t want to give you their place. That’s what makes them great players. They especially don’t want to give you their place if you arrive with the label of ‘Future Great Player’.” Within a year, Mbappé and France had won the World Cup in Moscow. Still, he admits: “You do always compare yourself with the best in your sport, just as the baker compares himself with the best bakers around him. Who makes the best croissant, the best pain au chocolat? I watch matches of other great players to see what they’re doing. ‘I know how to do this, but can the other guy do it too?’ I think other players watch me, too. I think that pushes players to raise their game, just as Messi was good for Ronaldo and Ronaldo was good for Messi.”

He then netted again at Santiago Bernabeu to put them 2-0 up on aggregate, though that lead was surrendered due to Karim Benzema’s last-gasp heroics for Madrid.He finished on a career-best tally of 29 Ligue 1 goals after netting a penalty in a 3-2 loss against Clermont on the final day of the season. He might have hit 30 for the first time but tried to set up Lionel Messi for a goodbye goal - the Argentine missed a simple chance. At the same age, Mbappé would also watch interviews of his heroes – Cristiano Ronaldo and Thierry Henry in particular – and pretend he was giving a press conference, putting the questions to himself. This perhaps laid the foundation for the quite extraordinary verbal fluency and the naturel of his media persona. As if somehow the young adult is still enjoying the “let’s pretend” games of his childhood, which he can play in three languages: his native French, English and Spanish; his mother tongue and the foreign languages he studied at school and perfected taking weekly tuition from 2019 onward. Again, better be prepared when the time comes to respond positively to Liverpool’s or, more to the point, Real Madrid’s insistent calls.

He played the full game against Benfica in Champions League matchday three without a goal contribution. There was evidence of a hangover from that loss in PSG's following match against Brest at the weekend, and indeed they would have dropped points had it not been for the striker. In the final minute of the match, he latched onto a pass from Lionel Messi, sped clear of the defence and rounded the goalkeeper to tap into an empty net. It was a finish that gave PSG a 2-1 win on what had promised to be a frustrating evening. Mbappe played without the suspended Messi in the game at Troyes on May 7. He managed to find the net in what was a 3-1 win for PSG.Mbappe added another two goals in the Champions League on Tuesday, as well as laying on an assist for Lionel Messi, as PSG roared past Maccabi Haifa 7-2. His scoring streak was extended to three games in the following weekend as they bagged what proved to be PSG's winner from the penalty spot in a thrilling 4-3 home success over Troyes.

In the final match before the March international break, Mbappe started up front with Messi at home to Rennes but they fell to a surprise 2-0 defeat.Surely he’s now too big a player for the French league? He umms and aws: “France isn’t the best championship in the world, but it’s my responsibility, as a flagship player, to help the league grow.” Yet he may well leave this summer, to Real Madrid or England. The decision, perhaps the biggest he’ll face in his career, will be made inside his family. Almost uniquely for a star footballer, Mbappé doesn’t have an agent, just lawyers. In the 2020-21 season, Mbappe scored 27 times from just 27 starts (31 total appearances) in Ligue 1, also contributing seven assists. He understood that his early triumph had upset football’s all-important hierarchies. Returning to PSG, he immediately reassured Paris’s Brazilian star Neymar: “I’m not going to walk on your flowerbeds. I’ll be a candidate for the Ballon d’Or [the award for world’s best footballer] this year because you won’t be, but I promise I don’t want to take your place.” French fans like their stars humble. Mbappé has explained “the French mentality” to Neymar, who favours a bling-bling, poker-playing party lifestyle. Mbappé says, “In Brazil, they are more festive, in France more serious. Here it’s not considered good to display your passions. People will think he’s neglecting PSG because he plays poker. I think he has begun to understand that. At first it was hard for him because he experienced it as an affront. When he arrived, they put his face on the Eiffel Tower, and six months later they’re asking him why he’s playing poker. In France, people know what you have but they don’t want to see it. They just want to see you playing football, smiling.” Kids in performance-sports families learn that they never arrive. Each step up is just another learning opportunity. In Monaco’s first team, the teenaged Mbappé encountered the veteran Colombian striker Radamel Falcao, freshly returned from unhappy loan spells with Manchester United and Chelsea.

He grew up practically inside the local football club, AS Bondy. “In the Parisian suburbs there are football fields everywhere,” he enthuses. “People here live for football. I was born with the sports ground facing my window.” It’s no wonder, he adds, that Paris’s suburbs are perhaps the deepest talent pool in global football, producing players such as Paul Pogba, Blaise Matuidi, N’Golo Kanté and Riyad Mahrez. Mbappé will take it all in as he always has and it seems always will, not as an obstacle but as another milestone in his irresistible rise to the very top of world football, now that we’re nearing the end of the Ronaldo-Messi era. And if he gets there (some would say he already has), it won’t be by accident. The grand plan was always to turn him into a superstar footballer. The Mbappés sifted the countless offers and chose Monaco, where the route to the first team looked shortest. Mbappé arrived there, he says, “with my [footballing] baggage well filled.”Mbappe bagged a brace in his next game, sparing Paris' blushes to help secure a 4-3 win over Lille.