Kylian Mbappe: World Cup hero for France and king of the chateau

Every year more than 1,000 of the most gifted young boys and girls in France trial for one of 23 coveted places at the Clairefontaine academy. Many of the modern greats of French football were schooled here, such as Nicolas Anelka and Thierry Henry, and the country’s record goalscorers Olivier Giroud and Eugenie Le Sommer.

Clairefontaine is nestled in dense forest an hour outside Paris, where lush pitches and smart dormitories surround an imposing chateau used by the French senior national teams. It is also a kind of bait: the young players who aspire to become professionals one day are forbidden from stepping inside the castle until they have made the grade.

For those who saw Kylian Mbappe grace the grass of Clairefontaine, his success was never in doubt. He arrived in the class of 2011 and the 13-year-old Mbappe was bestowed with the title Le Crack, meaning the best, the champion, the outstanding talent of his peer group.

He was raised in the Parisian suburb of Bondy and attended a private Catholic school. His mother, a former handball player, is of Algerian heritage and his football-coaching father was born in Cameroon. Wilfrid Mbappe trained his son from a young age and even at six years old he stood out from the crowd, dribbling around much older players with skill and speed. “I'd never seen a talent like him,” said his first youth coach at Bondy.

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By 14 he was being hunted by the best clubs in Europe and even met with Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane as he considered an offer to move his footballing education to the Spanish capital. But Mbappe’s parents were wary of the pressure of joining Madrid at such a young age. He travelled to London for a trial with Chelsea, but eventually settled on AS Monaco and a less severe spotlight.

From there, his rise was as quick as one of his supersonic runs across the pitch. The first team manager Leonardo Jardim promoted Mbappe to senior training aged 16.

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Henry is the player Mbappe was most often compared to, both in style and due to also starting his career at Monaco, but Mbappe deposed his idol twice, first as Monaco’s youngest ever player (16 years and 347 days) and then as their youngest goalscorer (17 years and 62 days).

The goals kept flowing, scoring 26 of them in his first full season to propel Monaco to an unlikely French title in the face of Paris Saint-Germain’s financial might, their first Ligue 1 crown for 17 years. PSG responded by buying him for £160m, and have won four of the five league titles since Mbappe joined.

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In 2018 Mbappe won the World Cup with France, aged just 19, scoring in the final and earning the tournament’s best young player award. It must live on a busy shelf of personal accolades: three Ligue 1 young player of the season awards, three Ligue 1 senior player of the season awards, four times the league’s top scorer, to name but a few.

Now 23, Mbappe is widely considered the best player in the world, the natural successor to the prolonged Messi-Ronaldo era of dominance, lighting up the World Cup in Qatar with his pace, his skill and his goals. Another French triumph in the final on 18 December would only cement his crown.

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Mbappe has been persistently linked with an eye-wateringly lucrative move to Real Madrid, so much so that it seems only a matter of when, not if, he will depart Paris. But he will never be gone long, returning to see his family, and to train with the national team at Clairefontaine; he is king of the chateau now.