Mbappe took an exclusive interview with The Athletic, and talked about Making history, the Ballon d’Or, and mid-air Liverpool talks.

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Interview PART 1

Through the security barriers, past all the pristine pitches and neatly kept borders, the entrance to Real Madrid's training ground is dominated by murals of their unrivalled European Cup collection. Fifteen, in total, from Paris in 1956 to London in 2024.

Then the door opens. Kylian Mbappe walks in — black T-shirt, grey pleated trousers billowing over his shoes — and the energy changes immediately. A smile, a handshake. “Pleasure to meet you,” he says. “Did you have a nice flight?”

He is, in many people’s eyes, the best footballer on the planet, a goalscorer extraordinaire with a level of fame that, as he will try to explain, is almost incomprehensible.

But it doesn’t take long in Mbappe’s company to be reminded that, at the heart of everything, he is still a football romantic, playing for the team he idolised as a boy and living out his childhood dream.

He takes his seat beneath the ‘Wall of Fame’ and looks up at the icons all around him. Cristiano Ronaldo is holding up five fingers to signify his personal haul of Champions League wins. There’s a Hugo Sanchez bicycle kick, a Pepe fist-pump, a Jose Mourinho knee-slide. Plus many others. “History,” Mbappe announces. “Famous history.”

And so we start talking about his own history-making, his fame, the goals, his back-to-back Golden Boots in the World Cup and how it feels, aged 27, to be the leading all-time scorer in the biggest sporting competition of them all.

We will talk about why he has just ended a near 20-year association with Nike, his chances of winning the Ballon d’Or next month and why he fully intends to keep speaking up for what he sees as good over bad.

He will also take us into a parallel world in which he confirms that, yes, his career could have taken a different path in 2017 with a move to Liverpool, at the age of 18. Was it close? Well, close enough that his mum, Fayza Lamari, doubling up as his agent, had more than one reconnaissance trip to Merseyside and recommended that he made the move to Anfield. “She fell in love with it,” her son explains.

We will even discuss his ideal guests for a fantasy five-a-side dinner party, why he won’t be cooking, his music tastes and the times, away from football, when he wishes he could be a “little bit of a ghost in my life”, away from the constant scrutiny.

First, though, maybe we can learn a bit more about Mbappe by understanding why he is able to answer these questions in fluent English. “I always wanted to speak different languages,” he explains. “It’s fun to learn a new culture. You can talk with everybody around the world and be independent. You don’t need to depend on someone translating.”

He now speaks excellent Spanish, too, as well as picking up some Portuguese and Italian. But it wasn’t at school that he dedicated himself to being multilingual. That came later, as he became conscious of its benefits if, as he fully intended, he was to conquer the world. “After school, I didn’t speak (other languages) at all,” he says. “I was 17, 18. I’m not scared to make mistakes.”