Kylian Mbappe is football’s Magic Johnson: sit back and enjoy the show
As he backpedalled towards the Nou Camp corner flag, beckoning his Paris Saint-Germain team-mates towards him with arms outstretched and a stoic nod of his head, Kylian Mbappe also seemed to be conducting his own coronation. After completing a spectacular hat-trick against Barcelona, the narrative of a changing of the Ballon d’Or guard would have been compelling enough without a weary and dejected Lionel Messi being present on the same pitch. With him looking on, it felt irresistible.
How strange, then, to take a step back and realise that we are already two-and-a-half years removed from what is likely to be Mbappe’s legacy-defining achievement: a World Cup final triumph — the holy grail that has managed to elude Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — with France at the first time of asking, sealed with a goal that saw him become the first teenager to score on that grandest of football stages since Pele did it 60 years earlier.
Great talent tends to present itself early, but only a select few obtain the sweetest rewards that greatness can bestow before their primes. Most compete in individual sports where fewer variables can deny them: Martina Hingis, Serena Williams, Boris Becker and Rafael Nadal all won grand slam tennis titles before their 20th birthdays, and Roger Federer was 21 when he claimed his first Wimbledon. Tiger Woods was 21 when he got his first green jacket at The Masters. Mike Tyson was 20 when he demolished Trevor Berbick to become the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, and Muhammad Ali was just 22 when he humiliated Sonny Liston.
Mbappe is enough of a student of sport to know the lofty company he now keeps.
He is particularly passionate about basketball, sitting courtside at Oracle Arena for the decisive Game Six of the 2019 NBA finals between Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors and attending the game staged in Paris between Milwaukee Bucks and Charlotte Hornets the following January. Last month, he partnered with fellow Nike athlete LeBron James for ‘The Chosen 2’, a collaboration that featured bespoke editions of the LeBron 18 shoe and Nike Mercurial football boot intended to highlight their parallel paths to greatness.
The comparison has merit beyond mere marketing: James, like Mbappe, proved himself a physical and technical marvel from day one of his professional career, despite suffocating hype. But in the pantheon of basketball greats, he is not the legend whose style and story resonates most with PSG’s superstar forward.
That man played his last NBA game two years before Mbappe was even born.
That man is Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr.
Magic first became an NBA champion around the same time he could legally drink at 21. Mbappe, similarly, helped France to win the World Cup at the age of 19. Reaching their sport’s pinnacle at such a young age set both men up for careers that would be defined on the quest to do it again, and again, and again. Winning, ultimately, deciding the place of both in the lexicon of greatness.
A flashy set-up man by trade, Magic could cover the gamut on a basketball court. In Game Six of the 1980 NBA Finals, his rookie season, the point guard played center instead in the Los Angeles Lakers’ series-clinching victory over the Philadelphia 76ers, posting 42 points, 15 rebounds, seven assists and three steals. It’s an achievement still celebrated more than 40 years later. It was an exercise in greatness. A great basketball player was a great basketball player, no matter his position.
Mbappe, too, carries this flexibility. A speedy, powerful and artful No 9 at his best, Mbappe acted as a right winger during his nation’s run for world supremacy in football at Russia 2018. In a position that still allowed the 19-year-old to be expressive and dangerous, he brought his own flavour to the flank, similarly to how Magic was still Magic with his back closer to the basket in that 1980 clincher.
There’s a reason these men can seamlessly navigate their respective mediums of expression. They were born to do this.
Hailing from Lansing in Michigan, where he led Everett High School to its first-ever state championship as a senior, Magic was a prodigy. He earned the nickname “Magic” at 15 because it was hard to believe the things he was doing with the ball. Colleges across the nation lined up for his services. Magic, whose parents both played basketball in their youth, decided on nearby Michigan State University. As a sophomore, in 1979, he led the school to its first NCAA basketball title.
Thirty-plus years later, across the pond in Paris, Mbappe, who, too, came from an athletic background with parents who played football and handball, was subject to a similar courtship at a young age. Europe’s elite football clubs welcomed a teenage Mbappe to their stadia, as all tried to land the services of the French whiz kid. Real Madrid. Chelsea. Bayern Munich. The who’s who of European soccer attempted to get Mbappe under their roof. He eventually chose Monaco, a Ligue 1 club in the south of France with a rich domestic history of their own.
After Michigan State, Magic was the first overall pick in the 1979 NBA Draft. This paired him with all-time great big man Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the Lakers and created one of the best one-two punches in league history. Along the same lines, Mbappe, after helping Monaco win the 2016-17 title as a 18-year-old, was handpicked by Paris Saint-Germain to play alongside its newly acquired and further-along superstar Neymar to create one of the most spectacular combos in European club football.
The parallels between Magic and Mbappe run deep. For both, it’s a story of how youth excellence has transformed and carried into exceptionalism at the grandest of stages. What perhaps links them more than anything else, though, is the way in which they go about their business. There’s flash and flair. There’s a welcoming arrogance. Magic once admitted that he and Boston Celtics star Larry Bird saved the NBA when interest in basketball was low in the US. And Mbappe, ahead of PSG’s Champions League game against Barcelona last week,
told Mauricio Pochettino that the manager was going to beat the Spanish side for only the second time in the former Spurs man’s career.
Qualities that tend to thread among all the greats — no matter the sport — are in the fabric of these two unicorns. Magic idolised Bill Russell growing up, primarily because of the Boston Celtics legend’s single-minded focus on winning; Mbappe’s hero was Cristiano Ronaldo, who is arguably the most relentless and dedicated winner of his generation in world soccer.
England havent done anything with a long ball since Bobby Moore found Geoff Hurst in the 120th min with some people running onto the pitch
