Kylian Mbappé Is A Gift
One thing certain to force a goofy grin from any less-than-joyed countenance is listening to, and/or watching, a young Michael Jackson in full voice. His face beamed with both an awareness of his ability as a singer, musician and performer, and also a perky eagerness to explore the vastness of each. The vulnerability of a kid throwing the entirety of his small self into every note like an enthusiastic skydiver makes you want to encourage him, even as you’re overwhelmed by him. To do so would be as useless as feeding a tidal wave vitamins, but you can’t help it, he’s amazing, and you want him to discover every inch of why.
One month after Michael Jackson won eight (8!) Grammys at the 1983 awards show he unveiled his trademark ‘moonwalk’ for the first time at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, the 25th anniversary celebration of Motown Records. This not only signaled that he was understanding himself as an immeasurably talented artist, but that as he was still curious and eager enough to continue defining the edges of his talent — that he was, still, nowhere near complete.
This is what it’s like watching Kylian Mbappé. Already a winner of back-to-back Ligue 1 titles, first with AS Monaco then Paris Saint-Germain, and now 2018 World Cup Champion with France.
Most of us will never know what it’s like to be so young as we discover a rare and supreme talent, but also rare is the opportunity to see such talent in the steepest trajectory of its development. Talents, even generational ones, tend to enter popular culture much closer to fully-formed than in the process of defining the scope of their talent. Imagine seeing a teenage Jimi Hendrix coax a cascade of notes from a ukulele with one string, or a thirteen-year-old Ronaldinho score 23 goals in one game. Imagine a nineteen-year-old Kylian Mbappé being the only ungoverned cylinder for a France throttled to obey the speed limit and scoring a goal in a World Cup final — wait.
This isn’t to say that fuzzy footage of an even fresher-faced Mbappé doesn’t exist, it does, but this present version is still charting his zenith, right before our eyes, and on the grandest stages of world soccer. More than his age, Mbappé’s relentless infatuation with charting the outer limits of his abilities is what makes Mbappé so rare, so fun, and if you’re unlucky enough to be tasked with marking him, so terrifying.
His Olympic-level pace is blinding and the softness of his touch while his feet move at violent speeds is categorically unfair, but the rudest thing about Mbappé is that you can almost see him following a checklist. Fakes, feints, flicks, drags, turns, stepovers, backheels, twists, runs at speeds illegal in residential neighborhoods, or just pure sauce — he tries it all, and once completed, he moves to the next unchecked item.
We typically see professional players at this level improve within the margins of their ability: learning the details of their position, reading play a touch more clearly, anticipating more, improving positioning, and becoming more precise. Mbappé is still figuring out what the combination of his body, brain, and skill makes him capable of, while still being a threat to score from a combination of ridiculous skills that he’s unearthing before our eyes.
And the irony of Mbappé’s signature goal celebration — suppressing his excitement to fold his arms and set his face in a temporary dull and unbothered gaze — is that while we’re left in awe, he’s projecting a sense that whatever remarkable thing he’d just done to put the ball in the net is commonplace. While we’re losing our collective minds he’s already moved beyond it, thinking of another, more interesting way he can score.
