Neymar's petty feuds threaten to see him fall into another shadow at PSG... Kylian Mbappe's
The teenager looks like he could be the one to take Lionel Messi's crown
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Your support makes all the difference.Marco Verratti couldn’t have put it any straighter, any starker. “We were missing a player like him.” Paris Saint-Germain had meanwhile been missing a properly expressive joy to their football like this.
The Italian playmaker wasn’t talking about Neymar, however, nor was he even initially asked about all the controversy regarding the world’s most expensive player. That suddenly didn’t seem quite so relevant. It had been blown away, along with the entire Bayern Munich team.
He was of course talking about Kylian Mbappe, and in utterly gushing terms. After a week that involved so much noise about Neymar and Edinson Cavani, the teenager simply cut through all that bulls*** - and the Bayern defence - with the type of uncomplicated but also unmatched talent that is already making him one of the best players in the world.
He was that good against the Germans, and is that good in general.
The Parc des Princes crowd certainly appreciated it, offering Mbappe a stadium-wide ovation as he went off on 80 minutes. Given all of the focus on PSG relationships and interactions, too, it was impossible not to wonder what Neymar was thinking at that moment… and impossible not to speculate a little out of all that.
It is now widely believed that at least part of the reason the Brazilian left Barcelona was because he wanted to be the main man at a club so he could become the best player in the world, and that was never going to happen any time soon with Lionel Messi at Camp Nou, but any reign may not last that long with Mbappe in this kind of form.
Verratti was almost wide-eyed after the match in praise of the 18-year-old, and especially his speed.
“Sometimes you can’t even keep up with him because he’s moving so fast.”
While it is that pace that makes his game so exhilarating at that age, and so empowers it, there is still just so much more to Mbappe. Otherwise, he would just be a Dennis Rommedahl or Adama Traore. He is not. The sophisticated analytics used by top European clubs actually indicate that, in the last year, he has been the player in the world closest to Messi.
With that in mind, there was almost a symbolism in how he utterly humiliated David Alaba with that drag-back for Neymar’s own eventual goal, just as the Argentine so famously humiliated another Bayern defender in Jerome Boateng two years ago.
The symbolism is not in the fact that one of the German defenders was merely tricked, either, but more in the hugely distinctive way it was again managed; a player offering such a seal of his own quality.
To repeat something else, too, if Neymar asserts himself as “100% Jesus”, his long-awaited goal in this game was 90% Mbappe. Mbappe himself was missing his own strike to make it a 100% perfect display, but that didn’t seem to matter because he had given his team so much, having also set up Cavani for the supreme second goal. He had shown a mature awareness and deftness of touch that only then accentuates the effects of the blistering pace of youth.
“He works a lot,” Verratti said. “On the field, he only makes choices that are for the team, never just for him. He’s a player with a future... We’re lucky to have him here. And we want to put him in the best conditions possible to use all of his talent.”
He may already be the best player in that team. He may well be the player that truly inherits Messi’s role as the Champions League’s next most dominant player.
You get the impression, though, that such superficialities and discussions don’t consume his mind as much as others - as much as Neymar.
Mbappe just gets on with it, and cuts through it. The pure joy of youth, the mature brilliance of a truly accomplished player.
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