WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A TEENAGE WONDERKID

IT WAS one of those classic moments that cause people to shut up and stand back in awe.

The year was 1994 and PSV Eindhoven’s players had heard that “a good young striker would be coming from Brazil, but that he was young and would need time to adapt, to the speed, especially to the weather”. The latter seemed particularly clear when, on a day of clear blue skies and 16 or 17C, this “good young striker” turned up to training wrapped up in two jackets.

Then, a ball was played to a 17-year-old Ronaldo, and it didn’t matter what he was wearing. All that mattered was that ability, that exhilarating potency, that potential.

“We thought ‘who’s that guy?’,” Erik Meijer, a teammate to Ronaldo at the time, said. “He was immediately playing like a 25-year-old.”

And he was immediately ripping through entire defences, like they were not really a concern – just as Kylian Mbappe is doing now.

While it is obviously far too early to say that Mbappe will be as good as the original Ronaldo, the fact is that both Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain were prepared to pay up to £200m for him, and that every other major club in Europe wanted him.

That is some going for someone whose senior career only started properly a few months ago, but it reflects a very rare case in football: those few players who immediately become among the best in the world as mere teenagers, whose impact is that pronounced, that indisputable.

It’s not quite the situation with players like Leo Messi or Diego Maradona, who were always talked about as youngsters and gradually became the greatest in the world.

It is more those bright sparks that suddenly blazed, whose contribution to a campaign or competition was so eye-opening that it arrested the entire world – like Pele in 1958, Ronaldo in the mid-90s, Michael Owen in 1998 and Mbappe now.

It is probably no coincidence, either, that those explosions were based on exhilarating speed, on a fearsome athleticism that seemed almost unplayable. That they came from someone so young only seemed all the more exciting, because of how their very youth fired the imagination of what was next going to be possible from them, of how they might further develop.

“It was the speed of the first three, four steps that was unbelievable,” Meijer says of Ronaldo. “In combination with his control of the ball, and especially how he found the shortest way to goal. Those three things in combination were, yeah, phenomenal.”

What has so far stood out with Mbappe has been a similar electricity, as it did for Owen. As filled with caveats as Owen’s career became, it’s too easy to forget just how frighteningly good he felt when scoring against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, just how feared he was.

“Well, I’ve obviously not known any differently to that,” Owen says. “It’s only when you grow older you realise how you thought about the game, how other people think, being around other people. My body was probably quite immature, but my football mind was like a 30-year-old when I was 17.”

It was that on-pitch maturity that Meijer also noted in Ronaldo, that showed it wasn’t just about sheer quality combined with power.

“I think those players have a certain radar, even at that age,” Meijer says. “They know exactly how big the pitch is, how many players are in the box, that extra instinct.

“Their way of playing football, they were not 17 or 18. In their behaviour or way of being, they looked for the young ones on their team. But they are not of the same football level, so after a while those extraordinary players start talking about technical and tactical things with older players, same as when you are a young kid that’s very smart, you go up two or three classes you have to go up the levels quicker.

“You need to always have the best players around you. If you reach a certain level, you have to go the next level. Otherwise you get lazy. I think that’s the biggest danger.” – The Independent