DOHA, Qatar – In these early months of the season, before anything was decided, the Paris Saint-Germain superstars mostly talked about what they could win together.
The French championship was surely seen as a formality; PSG these days always seem to win that title. The Champions League was seen as a bigger prize; the team, assembled with the expenditure of vast amounts of Qatar’s considerable wealth, had never won it.
But in the dressing room of Paris Saint-Germain’s training center, the team’s three headliners – star forwards Neymar of Brazil, Kylian Mbappé of France and Lionel Messi of Argentina – also had another trophy in store. head. As they exchanged sweet ribs and regular banter inside the aging locker room at Camp des Loges, a former French military camp surrounded by forest on the outskirts of Paris, they all knew the World Cup was coming and all desperately wanted to win. he.
“Everyone stands up for their country,” Mbappé said with a laugh as he described the exchanges during an interview at the Manhattan bureau of The New York Times this summer. “But we laugh a lot. We’re going to say, ‘Yeah, my country is going to win. We’re going to beat you. No, we’re going to beat you.’”
But now what for months served as background chatter, a way for top athletes to let off steam, has suddenly become very real.
Neymar has already left the conversation, and the World Cup. But Mbappé and Messi qualified for Sunday’s final at the Lusail stadium. Messi, who said he was playing in his last World Cup, will be looking to win the only award that has eluded him in a glittering career. Mbappé is after another honour: he can become a two-time World Cup winner if France win on Sunday, repeating a feat last achieved by Pelé’s Brazilian sides in 1958 and 1962.
Mbappé had already written his name alongside Pelé four years ago in Russia, when he joined the Brazilian as the only teenager to score in a World Cup final. His stunning form, not just the goals but the unwavering confidence he displayed to help win the France title, elevated his status to a true superstar overnight.
In Qatar, Mbappé could no longer have the comfort of being the man to come, someone who could step out of the shadows. Excellence, he knew, would be expected.
“It’s different because I’m a different player,” he said of his second World Cup. “When I arrived in my first World Cup, I was a young teenager. I was a young man. Not everyone in the world knew me well. I was a great PSG player but not really known in the world. Now it’s different. Everyone knows me – the pressure is different.
So far, Mbappé seems to have managed this pressure.
He and Messi are tied in the race to be the tournament’s top scorer, with five goals apiece. Although he hasn’t always been at his best, including curiously calm streaks against England and Morocco in the round of 16, Mbappé has consistently shown glimpses of pace and explosiveness that leave no doubt. on the fact that he carries on his shoulders the chances of conquest of France. Argentina and Messi.
“For me, this is the greatest thing in world football,” said Mbappé. “Because when you talk about football you have the World Cup in mind. Because it’s the only competition everyone watches. You don’t have to like football to watch the World Cup.
The mass appeal will not be reinforced until Sunday. The overriding storyline of the final – Messi’s last shot at the trophy he dreams of more than any other – has in part made Mbappé a foil in the narrative, the key man who could prevent Messi from getting his end in Hollywood.
The two have been teammates for over a year now, the young suitor and the aging star, and it has felt like a bumpy ride at times. As if sharing a pitch, let alone a ball, wasn’t enough to appease the collections of talents – and egos – amassed by PSG, Mbappe said the noise that sometimes surrounds these relationships is not always an accurate reflection of reality.
After all, he said, like any other football-loving kid, he would have dreamed of lining up alongside Messi and Neymar.
“I think the problem comes from the outside because everyone is asking questions they don’t have answers to, so they put a problem between us,” Mbappé said this summer, amid whispers that he had asked for control as the price of his re-signing with PSG News’ reports of the discord, he said, were false. “We have a great relationship.”
But it’s hard not to see that relationship tested on Sunday. One of them will leave the field champion, the other a broken heart.
Mbappé said he knew what to expect. Able to study Messi’s game so closely at his club for over a year, he said he was impressed with the Argentine’s ability to pick the right shot, play the right pass, measure the moments requiring his intervention with perfect timing, no matter the chaos around him.
“He’s calm, always calm,” Mbappé said of Messi. “Calm down with the ball. Calm down before he shoots. He’s always in control of everything he does.
“It’s really impressive because sometimes there’s a lot of pressure with the game and with the fans, with the people. But he’s always calm to make the right decision at the right time.
Sunday, too, can be decided in an instant, by a moment of genius from Messi or, perhaps, a winning goal from Mbappé.
Outside the Al Bayt stadium earlier this week, in the early morning hours as Wednesday turned into Thursday after France beat Morocco in the semi-finals, there was a sense of relief as well as pressure in the camp. Mbappe. Fayza Lamari, her mother and a cornerstone of her relentless march to stardom since the early days, emerged from the arena near the VIP entrance shouting, “We won! We won!” as she headed for the exit.
She wasn’t the only one smiling. Qatar, which spent over $200 billion to host the World Cup, now has its dream final. In a few weeks, he will welcome both Messi and Mbappé to PSG, bringing together his two biggest stars from the Qatari club after facing off in a showcase final at Lusail.
For Qatar, the question of Messi or Mbappe doesn’t really matter. He has already won.
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