One of the most damaging things that can happen to a player’s career is winning a World Cup. Once you’ve climbed the game’s highest peak, where is there left to go? Most of the French world champions of 1998 went on to have dreadful league seasons in 1998/99. Their captain, Didier Deschamps (now France’s coach) later admitted to feeling “physical and moral apathy” after lifting the trophy. In the next World Cup, the French were knocked out in the first round, the fate of four of the last five teams to win the trophy.
Winning it as a young player is probably worse. In 2002, the Paris St-Germain forward Ronaldinho, 22 at the time, became world champion with Brazil. He then briefly flowered into the planet’s best player, but four years later was spiralling downwards.
So it’s natural to worry now that another young PSG forward, Kylian Mbappe, France’s 19-year-old world champion, has got his career upside down. Winning the World Cup and scoring in the final was “the absolute dream”, he has said. It might seem hard to go from that to an away game in a small French town, or even Anfield, where PSG went down 3-2 to Liverpool in matchday 1 of the Champions League group stage. Mbappe had a lackluster game in England, scoring once but losing possession for Roberto Firmino’s last-minute winner. Nonetheless, mere weeks after Luzhniki, the Frenchman already looks well equipped on the long term to surmount the post-World Cup curse.
We’re still just getting to know Mbappe, and the fly-on-wall documentary about France at the World Cup, shown on the French TV channel TF1 days after the final, was a help. He emerges from the film as a disciplined, popular squad member whose teammates enjoy teasing him about his age. In one scene, shot after France’s lucky 2-1 win in their opening game against Australia, a furious Deschamps (“I don’t want anybody laughing!”) lays into his assembled players for the lack of high-intensity runs. He then turns to Mbappe and says, “Kylian is the one who did least: 3 percent.” (In other words, only 3 percent of Mbappe’s running in the game was at high-intensity.)
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