Captain Mbappé

We met him as a teenage prodigy. Now, with his PSG teammates Messi and Neymar gone, and a new job as French national team captain, Kylian Mbappé is reckoning with the responsibilities and privileges that come with being the man.

- MAXIME JOLY

KYLIAN MBAPPÉ is sore. It's November, and last night Mbappé's Paris Saint-Germain fought out a bitter draw with Newcastle in the Champions League group stage at the Parc des Princes. Mbappé scored a penalty in stoppage time, rescuing a point after a frustrating team performance. But if he's sour about it, Mbappé doesn't show it, today dressed casually in a plain black T-shirt and a loose-fitting pastel-coloured Jordan tracksuit, a Hublot Big Bang One Click peeking out from the sleeve. "Football is a complex thing and you quickly forget the positive experiences as well as the negative ones," he tells me. "You always have to adapt and reinvent yourself."

A few post-game aches are standard for Mbappé, a player who, at 25, has somehow already played over 400 games at the summit of men's football. After breaking through as a teenage sensation at AS Monaco, Mbappé won the World Cup with France at just 19. In 2017, he moved to PSG for €180 million ($215 million), becoming one of the most expensive jewels in an all-star stacked team that for two seasons included Neymar and Lionel Messi. He is already Paris Saint-Germain's all-time top scorer; it seems likely that, sooner or later, he'll achieve the same status with the French national team. (Along the way he became the youngest player ever to reach the shortlist for the Ballon d'Or.)