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Remember the coronation that never quite happened?
A few years ago, Kylian Mbappé was the consensus heir. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo would eventually ride off and the boy from Bondy – a World Cup winner as a teenager, the first teenager to score in a final since Pelé – would inherit the throne. In 2022, he almost took it by force: a Golden Boot, a hat-trick in the final, one of the great individual World Cups ever played. Argentina still lifted the trophy and the narrative moved on without him.
Four years later, it’s time to move it back.
(Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Mbappé, at 27, is the best player in the world right now and the 2026 World Cup is making his case game by game. Seven goals in five games – matches against Senegal and Iraq, another against Sweden, the winner from the spot in a street game with Paraguay. He became France’s leading goalscorer along the way, passing Ronaldo and Miroslav Klose on the World Cup scoring charts and now sits on 19 tournament goals, one behind Messi’s all-time record.
No one in history has scored more World Cup knockout goals. No one has scored more World Cup winners. He leads a French side that looks like the most complete side in the tournament – and he hasn’t even had to be big every night for Les Bleus to win all five.
Yes, Messi gets a magical farewell and Erling Haaland pulls Norway into places Norway has never been. But Messi is 39 and playing his last dance. Ronaldo has just left his last World Cup in the round of 16. And Haaland, for all his ruthlessness, is a specialist – the greatest penalty-box predator alive, and proudly nothing else.
Mbappé is the complete package. World-class pace that still breaks defensive lines in a dead sprint. The technical ability to beat a man on both sides. He can stay on the left touchline or through the middle. And he is a clinical finisher through and through. Attackers usually get one or two of these gifts. He got the whole package.
So why did some stop saying it? Blame it on the noise in Madrid. Real Madrid’s season was a soap opera – no trophies, a manager under siege and Mbappé was cast as one of the villains mocking inside his own stadium in May. Lost in the drama: he won Pichichi again. His numbers never dropped, but the love did.
(Photo by Sven Hoppe/image alliance via Getty Images)
Now he has found it, and it shows. Watch him this summer – laughing through hydration breaks, sprinting to embrace Didier Deschamps after scoring against Sweden days after the coach buried his mother, playing with the joy of a man who spent a year being told he was the problem and is now, indisputably, the solution. The smile is back. So is the terror he inspires.
Thursday brings Morocco in Boston, a rematch of the semifinals in 2022, and maybe Messi awaits at the end – Lusail’s ghost, four years later, in New York. You couldn’t write it better.
And here’s the kicker: for all he’s done, Mbappé has never won a Ballon d’Or. Win this World Cup as the star of the show – the record within reach, the Golden Boot in play, the best team in the field – and that conversation ends in about four seconds.
In 2022, he did everything but lift the trophy. In 2026, he might do everything, period. The throne has been empty long enough.
