Football is a hard drug that offers immediate satisfaction and indignation; viewed through its prism, Kylian Mbappé can be idolized and Lionel Messi sacrificed in the same game. Reason has nothing to do with it: the drug attacks your emotions – and at the cost of the footballers.
Mbappé cost €150m before he was worth that. As there is more money than talent on the market, promise and expectation get bought at the price of reality. The price turned the media spotlight on this prodigious child and so a ceremony of confusion began. Football is a very serious game but it is full of people doing all they can to make idiots of footballers.
Mbappé, in this year of adaptation to his price and the expectations placed upon him, played well and played OK (he doesn’t know how to play badly). He also saw team-mates of the level of Edinson Cavani and Neymar from up close. A fine education, if you know how to see it, how to look for the right lessons. He had the privilege of being able to imitate essential characteristics: the generous endeavour of Cavani, a striker who covers the entire pitch; Neymar’s magic, conjured up through speed, skill and fantasy. He also ran the risk of imitating other characteristics, ‘learning’ the wrong thing: the Uruguayan’s jealousy towards the Brazilian (remember the penalty crisis?); Neymar’s excessive, sometimes irritating desire to put on a show.
And all that he learned at an important club, one of those clubs that help you triumph but don’t forgive you if you do not. In other words: under intense pressure. If a player so young can come out of that cocktail of experiences alive, he is a phenomenon, not just once but twice: for his talent and for his maturity.
When Mbappé arrived at the World Cup he was still under observation, an object of expectation. In the first few games neither he nor France appeared comfortable. The midfielders could not generate fluidity in the play and the three forwards distributed the space badly. They won, but did not convince. But the knockout phase came against Messi’s Argentina and Mbappé definitively demonstrated that his talent was as high as the expectations. It was one of those games in which a player walks on to the pitch as someone and, thanks to his enormous talent, walks off again as someone else. Football is an emotional, mind-altering drug, bending perception.
Mbappé chose the day that Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo left the World Cup to start his revolution. Without asking permission, without the need to knock discreetly at the door, he burst into footballing history, flattening everything before him. From the first minute, he appeared to be made of wind and steel, taking flight and destroying the Argentinian defense.
The conditions were perfect. Argentina tried to keep the ball to control the game but could barely touch France. When your team becomes so rhetorical with the ball, you end up wanting them to lose it sooner rather than later, because if they lose it later, when the opponents are positioned deep, waiting, then the same scene recurs.
In the Argentina-France game, we saw it as Mbappé running towards goal, three Argentinians chasing behind him. If they didn’t catch him: goal. If they did catch him: penalty. Argentina were poor but Mbappé was colossal, demonstrating a precision at speed that we hadn’t seen since Ronaldo, the fun, talented Brazilian who when he set off was like an entire herd stampeding.
The leap in quality and prestige that Mbappé made against Argentina takes him closer to football’s summit. What remains to be seen is how well, how naturally, he can live up there. His talent appears greater than the dangers that await him. His kingdom requires space and the ball, but he will not always encounter those as easily as he did against Argentina. The risk is that in this football, which celebrates impact, like never before, placing imagery above all else, he satisfies himself with producing plays rather than playing – and they are not the same thing.
He has Antoine Griezmann alongside him, from whom he can learn to play while he waits for the move to appear. He can learn collective sense, to help teammates, to be committed tactically, to request the ball to feet as well as in space. When you’re fully connected to the team, integrated with the idea, the move appears without having to go looking for it. The rest will come naturally, a product of an exceptional talent which over the next decade will help us overcome the nostalgia that Messi’s and Ronaldo’s inevitable decline will provoke in us.
Mbappé stepped into another dimension against Argentina and as football is full of paradox, something happened to his price too: the same day he proved he was worth what they paid for him, his price doubled.7
(The Guardian)
