Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
In the 2020-21 season, Mbappe scored 27 times from just 27 starts (31 total appearances) in Ligue 1, also contributing seven assists. These revelations came out hours before a Champions League meeting with Benfica, but that did not stop him from converting a penalty to become Les Parisiens' leading marksman in the competition.
He lives like a luxury prisoner, who cannot leave home without being mobbed. “It takes an organisation just to go out,” he says. He has joked that when his future children ask him about his youthful adventures, he won’t have any. In high-level football, nobody will make a place for you. Ego, self-love, isn’t just the caprice of stars. It’s also the will to give the best of yourself Mbappe scored his first goal of 2023 in a friendly match against Riyadh All-Star XI, dispatching a 60th minute penalty as PSG ran out 5-4 winners despite Juan Bernat's first-half red card. The goal won't count towards Mbappe's statistics, however, as it wasn't a competitive match. French fans like their stars humble. Mbappé has explained “the French mentality” to Neymar, who favours a bling-bling, poker-playing party lifestyle. Mbappé says, “In Brazil, they are more festive, in France more serious. Here it’s not considered good to display your passions. People will think he’s neglecting PSG because he plays poker. I think he has begun to understand that. At first it was hard for him because he experienced it as an affront. When he arrived, they put his face on the Eiffel Tower, and six months later they’re asking him why he’s playing poker. In France, people know what you have but they don’t want to see it. They just want to see you playing football, smiling.” He was shut out in PSG's subsequent Ligue 1 game against Lyon, which ended in a 1-0 victory for the Parisians. Nevertheless, he completed the 90 minutes, with Neymar taken off before him.The prodigy had a role model close at hand. Wilfried and Fayza had come to the assistance of Congolese friends and provided shelter to Jirès Kembo Ekoko, a nine-year-old who had been sent from Kinshasa to France to escape a problematic family situation. Jirès, Kylian’s senior by more than a decade, was a promising winger who went straight from Bondy’s under-11s team to the Clairefontaine academy and progressed to France’s junior and Espoirs international team and later played for Rennes in Ligue 1. Kylian’s first treasured shirt was the one that the man he considers his “big brother” gave him after scoring two goals against Estonia in his first match for France Under-23s. As Mbappé would later put it in an animated film he made in 2020, Je m’appelle Kylian, whose first frames show him emerging into the world from the shell of a football-shaped egg, “I was born into football.” He understood that his early triumph had upset football’s all-important hierarchies. Returning to PSG, he immediately reassured Paris’s Brazilian star Neymar: “I’m not going to walk on your flowerbeds. I’ll be a candidate for the Ballon d’Or [the award for world’s best footballer] this year because you won’t be, but I promise I don’t want to take your place.”
Winning the World Cup made Mbappé a national hero. Does he consider himself a star? “I think so. If your face is everywhere in the city, everywhere in the world, that’s for sure. Being a star is a status, but it doesn’t make me a better person than others.” When you’re in the World Cup final, you’re convinced you’re going to win. You walk onto the field, the trophy is there, and you tell yourself it is impossible the other team will take it In 2013, when 14 years old, Mbappé ignored the advances of Chelsea and Real Madrid and went to Monaco instead. Neymar chose to stay at Santos for at least one extra season, enabling his advisers to expand a lucrative local sponsorship portfolio, before joining Barcelona for the kind of fee which guaranteed it would be almost impossible to leave the recruit on the bench. But there the similitudes end. In Mbappé’s case, it was a decision which the player was involved in. In Neymar’s, even if he was happy enough to go along with his father’s decision, that decision was taken for him.
Kylian Mbappe: 2022-23 PSG stats
In the final match before the March international break, Mbappe started up front with Messi at home to Rennes but they fell to a surprise 2-0 defeat. An 18-year-old Kylian Mbappé after scoring for Monaco against Manchester City in the Champions League. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
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