French star Mbappé is beyond compare
MOSCOW — At this point we 7 billion residents of Earth really ought to hone a skill at which we are hopelessly, unrelentingly lousy. We should practice — don’t laugh — restraint as we envision the staggering future of Kylian Mbappé, who is still somehow five months shy of age 20.
We must refrain from comparing the French lad to Pelé or the Brazilian Ronaldo. We must let him breathe his own life and try to avoid statements such as the thunder above Luzhniki Stadium on Sunday evening seemed to emanate from his running. Yeah, there’s no hope. What we can say with sufficient caution is that Mbappé is going to make temporary alterations to respiratory patterns in stadiums all over the world. Maybe he will do this for his current employer, Paris SaintGermain, maybe for others later on, and surely for the French national team, but the sounds that crowds repeatedly made at the soaring 21st World Cup figure to ripple across the Earth for an Mbappé decade to come.
Is that fair? The ball will go toward Mbappé or Mbappé toward the ball, and the sound will change. His futuristic speed and cartoonish command will wreak mass inhalation or mass gasping or mass murmuring. Human beings cannot help it.
It kept happening Sunday evening when supreme France bested admirable Croatia 4-2 to win the World Cup title. Even on a pitch strewn with formidable talent, with a constellation of it on the French side, the idea of Mbappé brought an unmistakable extra layer of reaction from the 78,011 in the crowd, as it had in the round of 16 in Kazan when he appeared 10 feet tall with three Argentine defenders trailing him hopelessly, or in the semifinals in St. Petersburg, where he served as a presence, if not as a man of the match, against Belgium.
The sight of him stirs the souls who watch this art — and eventually probably even some who don’t. Even when it leads to nothing, it always feels like something.
It made sense that Mbappé would matter in the championship match of a World Cup in which he had introduced himself anew, even though soccer intellectuals have known of him since he made his professional debut for Monaco in 2015 at age 16 years, 347 days. Sunday’s match stood at 2-1 for France at halftime. It had hinged on a Croatian foul and on a Croatian handball called upon video replay that might have been discussed into the 22nd century depending on life expectancy. It needed something to cement France’s achievement as the reliable force of this woolly World Cup. Then it got plenty of Mbappé. First, in the 59th minute, midfielder Paul Pogba sent one of those balls you can’t believe anybody could send from just behind midfield all the way up the right. It found its way to the wunderkind. The crowd stirred. Mbappé worked the top right area of the box.
Mbappé crossed to the masterful Antoine Griezmann, who shoveled the ball back to an arriving Pogba atop the box so that Pogba could try a right-footed blast, have that blocked and try a left-footed scoop that whirred into the left edge of the goal.
France led 3-1, but for a further statement of quality six minutes later, defender Lucas Hernandez muscled through some defenders on the left side, then crossed to Mbappé waiting in the middle atop the box. When Mbappé shipped a ball just slightly and counterintuitively leftward and into the goal, then ran over to the left side, hopped and landed with his arms crossed, it seemed he really did own a considerable chunk of the world at 19.
He arrived about as emphatically as anybody ever did, and it seems clear that people all over the world will know of his childhood in the oft-forgotten Paris suburb of Bondy, his athletic parents who played soccer (father) and handball (mother), his Cameroonian and Algerian lineage, his part in the team’s idealistic diversity, of which Griezmann said: “That’s the France we love. That’s it. There are different origins but we are all united. It’s the same in our team.”