Statesman, comedian and dealer of hard truths: how Kylian Mbappé became the king of this World Cup

The Frenchman is a footballer, flautist and a thespian. There’s no question he is the most thrilling and compelling figure at this year’s tournament

This has been the World Cup of characters, bold fashion statements, and bantz: we’ve had Thomas Tuchel rubber-banding around the England dressing room like a teen at his first all-ages rave, and Iván Barton booting Miguel Almirón from the field as if sentencing him to death. Mauricio Pochettino and his $500 overshirt have brought fresh energy and inspiration to the wardrobes of convex middle-aged men the world over. Jokester Javier Aguirre’s avuncular “fuck you” at Anthony Gordon has pushed bilateral relations between Mexico and England to their warmest point since the British-brokered peace that ended the Pastry War of 1839.

Erling Haaland has shown it’s possible to be Jaws in front of goal and Scoo who identified himself as sitting to the player’s “extreme left.” Without missing a beat, Mbappé replied: “Good thing you weren’t on the other side.”

Rarely if ever has football seen a player who’s this aware of his own press, or this prepared to embrace his own capacity for polarization. If Michael Jordan lived by the rule that “Republicans buy sneakers too”, Mbappé appears quite happy with a world in which acolytes of the far right go shoeless. It’s perhaps no surprise, at this World Cup, that Mbappé’s most forceful public intervention has been a volcanic denunciation of the Paraguayan senator who launched a racist attack against him after her country’s defeat to Les Bleus in the round of 16. “Madame Celeste Amarilla, you are a despicable woman”, Mbappe’s statement began; “I will never allow people like her the freedom to spread their hatred and racism across the world,” it ended, with a satisfying clank. After years of dreary neutrality and deflection among the global sporting elite, Mbappé’s refreshing embrace of political combat feels like emerging into a new geological era. The Ronaldocene is over; the Mbappécene begins.

The deeply felt sense of principle, the unabashed intellectualism, the attention to the importance of words amid the ongoing mastery of gestures: what forces, exactly, have combined to construct this remarkable personality, to make the myth of Mbappé? “It’s a question of education”, the man himself once said. Mbappé was, by all accounts, a restless child, but his parents did everything in their means to give him the tools to control his superabundance of energy: he had a dedicated psychologist from the seventh grade, there were flute and theatre lessons, and then of course there was football too.

The family home in Bondy, a suburb of northeastern Paris, was a block away from the Stade Léo-Lagrange, a small but well equipped municipal football stadium. This World Cup began with 56 players from Paris – more than from any other city on Earth. There’s been much discussion over the past few weeks about the banlieue – the extramural belt in which the vast majority of Paris’s 13 million residents live, and from which virtually all of its great footballers have emerged. Bondy is the chernozem of modern French football; Mbappé’s teammate William Saliba also grew up in the neighborhood, as did many other professional footballers past and present. What is it that has made the banlieue parisienne such a formidable factory of footballing talent: is it density, public subsidization of sport, the design of social housing, the size of the pitches, the often fractious chemistry between migrant communities and mainstream French culture?

It’s all of these, probably, but Bondy reveals another aspect of this urban biome that’s worth paying attention to. Within walking distance of the stadium where Mbappé became a footballer, amid the discount home goods stores and the drab prefabricated apartment blocks and the many football fields, you will find a whimsical public housing development whose cylindrical towers are all clad in brightly glazed tile; a swooping Oscar Niemeyer-designed Brutalist masterpiece that serves as the local bourse du travail, a center for mutual aid and worker organization; and a public swimming center named after Belgian singer Jacques Brel. Nothing better captures the constraining promise of the French banlieue, its strange power as a laboratory of footballing talent, than this one square mile grid of monotony, amenity, solidarity, and ambition.

And at the center of it all, gathering together disparate threads of French culture, embodying the best of his country’s self-critical and sporting traditions, stands Mbappé. He’s a statesman and a comedian, a wellspring of memes and a dealer of hard truths, the sport’s highest moral authority and its trustiest punchline. He’s a footballer, he’s a flautist, he’s a thespian. And he is charging into World Cup history with the imperial calm of a man who has understood his own direction from the first murmurs of consciousness. Arise, King Kylian: Napoleon may have had to crown himself, but there’s no question on whose head football’s jewelry of state lies today.