Paris: FIFA World Cup 2022 final hat-trick hero Kylian Mbappe took to Twitter and thanked fans for their message on the occasion of the footballer’s 24th birthday. Mbappe turned 24 on December 20. “Thank you all for your messages,” Mbappe tweeted.
24 🎉🎂
Merci à tous pour vos messages. 🥰 pic.twitter.com/EnMoAqO4Bd— Kylian Mbappé (@KMbappe) December 20, 2022
His bid to become the youngest two-time winner since Pele in 1962 ended in heartbreak in Qatar after Argentina defeated France. Mbappe finished as the tournament’s Golden Boot winner with eight goals.
Here are 10 things to know about Kylian Mbappe:
- Mbappe is already up to sixth on France’s list of all-time top scorers with 36 goals, one behind Karim Benzema — the Ballon d’Or winner whose absence in Qatar was mitigated by the brilliance of Mbappe.
- He has scored 12 World Cup goals in 14 matches and is level with Brazil legend Pele in sixth on the all-time list. He is only the second player to find the target in successive World Cup finals after Vava, who scored in Brazil’s wins in 1958 and 1962.
- Mbappe, who plays as a forward for Ligue 1 club Paris Saint-Germain has scored 253 times in 363 games for club and country, a tally that far exceeds those of Messi and Ronaldo at the same age.
- Born in an immigrant family on December 20, 1998, in Paris, he was raised in Bondy, in the city’s suburbs. While his father, Mbappé’s agent and a football coach, is originally from the African country of Cameroon, his mother is of Algerian Kabyle origin. She was a handball player.
- Mbappe started his football journey in Bondy when he was five. As a child, he used to sit in with his father, then a youth coach with his hometown club AS Bondy, during the team’s tactical discussions. Consequently, he learnt how to absorb tactical information very early on.
- As a young boy, Mbapper idolised Portugese star Cristiano Ronaldo and had his posters all over his room at home.
- At 23, he was on the Forbes’ list of world’s highest-paid football players and was expected to get a record $128 million in annual earnings.
- Mbappe donated all his earnings from FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia 2018 to a children’s charity. He reportedly earned close to half a million US dollars from the tournament.
- Mbappe’s love for sneakers is well-known. As a young boy, he would plead with his mother to get him the latest runners. “When my mom didn’t want to buy me a certain model, I used to cry to change her mind. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not, so I moved on to something else,” he told Hypebeast in 2018.
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