Kylian Mbappé, born in Paris in 1998, is France’s all-time top scorer with 67 goals and the highest scorer in World Cup history with 22. He scored in the 14th minute of Real Madrid’s 2-1 win over Inter on matchday 1 of this season’s Champions League.
Kylian Mbappé Lottin was born on 20 December 1998 in the 19th arrondissement of Paris and raised in Bondy, in the city’s north-eastern suburbs. His father, Wilfrid, is a football coach from the Cameroonian island of Djébalè, and his mother and agent, Fayza Lamari, is of Algerian Kabyle origin and a former handball player. His younger brother, Ethan, plays for Lille, and an older adopted brother, Jirès Kembo Ekoko, is a former professional footballer. At school he was considered academically gifted but unruly, and at 15 he took Spanish lessons and became fluent.
As a boy he supported Real Madrid and idolised Zinedine Zidane, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Thierry Henry. He began at AS Bondy at six and started his senior career in 2015 with Monaco, where he won the 2016-17 Ligue 1 title, the club’s first league title in 17 years. In 2017, at 18, he signed for Paris Saint-Germain in a deal eventually worth €180 million, which made him the second-most-expensive player in the world.
At PSG he won 15 trophies, including six Ligue 1 titles and four Coupes de France, helped the club reach the 2020 Champions League final, and became its all-time top scorer with 256 goals. He was Ligue 1’s top scorer a record six times and its Player of the Year a record five times. In 2021-22 he became the first player to be both Ligue 1 top scorer and top assist provider in the same season.
In 2024 he joined Real Madrid on a free transfer and, in his debut season, scored in both the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Intercontinental Cup as Madrid won both. He won the European Golden Shoe in 2025, was La Liga’s top scorer in 2025 and 2026, and was the Champions League’s top scorer in 2026. He captains France.
At the World Cup he is without equal for his age. In 2018 he became the second teenager after Pelé to score in a final and win the tournament. In 2022 he scored a hat-trick in the final, set the record for most goals in World Cup finals (four) and won the Golden Boot. In 2026 he won the Golden Boot again, with 10 goals, tying Gerd Müller as the third-highest single-tournament scorer and becoming the first player to win multiple World Cup Golden Boots.
He has more than 400 senior goals and has been named in the FIFPRO World 11 six times. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023, and Forbes listed him among the ten highest-paid athletes in 2023 and 2024. This season he scored Madrid’s opening goal in the win over Inter, and Madrid travel to Roma on Wednesday. He made his senior debut for France in 2017, helped France win the 2021 UEFA Nations League as top scorer of the finals, and was the Champions League’s top scorer in a season twice, and received the Golden Boy in 2017 and the Kopa Trophy in 2018.
Image: Kylian Mbappé playing for France at the 2026 World Cup (file photo). Photo: Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
