Kylian Mbappe | Before They Were Famous | Biography of French Football GOAT

Before They Were Famous

05-01-2023 • 8 mins

Before almost single-handedly winning France the World Cup with a rare hat-trick in the Final match of the tournament, Kylian Mbappe was born on December 20th, 1998 in the city of Paris -- and as the athlete himself once suggested in a children’s book made about his life, from the very beginning, Kylian Mbappe was born into football. In a lot of ways, you could also say that Kylian was born in the right place at the right time. His local football club, AS Bondy, was where his Cameroon-born father, Wilfried, used to coach under-15s and would go on to train more than a dozen top professionals -- but it was his son that Wilfried always had the greatest designs for. Of course, it wasn’t just Kylian’s parents who wanted greatness for him – he wanted it for himself, and from a young age too. At just six years old he learned every line to France’s national anthem while explaining to his teachers at school that he was doing so in preparation for playing in the World Cup. At that same age, he’d also watch interviews of his many heroes, studying how a talent like Cristiano Ronaldo would handle the media and then pretend to hold his own press conferences by posing questions to himself in what would eventually become three languages – his native French, as well as English and Spanish -- the foreign languages he studied at a private Catholic school.

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