Paris Saint-Germain and France superstar Kylian Mbappé is a man on a mission - to reach the highest peaks in football. The 22-year-old world beater sat down with UEFA to discuss his ambitions and how he plans to realise them.
Ligue 1 Uber Eats top scorer in the current campaign (19 goals), Mbappé recently hit the 100-goal mark in France's top flight, and in doing so became the youngest-ever player in any of Europe's top five leagues to do it, eclipsing the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ambition
But he's not planning on stopping there.
"I think I'm an ambitious person. It's a term that can scare some people, but I see it rather as the fact of not wanting to set yourself any limits," the said the native of the Paris region, currently on World Cup qualifying duty as France set about defending their 2018 crown. "I try to push the limits to the maximum and I want to see where that can take me."
Steel
His ambition has taken him from the Paris suburbs to the AS Monaco youth academy, then to the principality club's senior team, where he won the first of four consecutive Ligue 1 Uber Eats titles and earned his first France call-up at 18 before making the move to Paris Saint-Germain.
"For a long time, in youth teams, people said I didn't score enough, to above all put on a show. In football nowadays, you have to score. And to score, you have to practice how to do it. You have to work on it in training," explained the mercurial forward whose mental strength belies his young age. "When you're struggling, no one else can pick you up. You have to be strong mentally and do everything to understand that you can move mountains. When I go onto the pitch, I say to myself that I'm going to give my all to be the best I can possibly be."
World beater
This approach evidently served him well as he helped Les Bleus to the World Cup title in Russia in 2018, scoring four goals - one of which came in the final against Croatia - and earning the FIFA World Cup Best Young Player Award.
Again, the young man with a rapacious appetite for records and success is looking to push on to even greater heights.
"We want to win a second one," he declared. "The World Cup is a goal, something you work towards for a long time and that you win when you have worked your way to the top. I was fortunate enough to win it at 19, that's something that is going to help me progress in my career. There will be other challenges, and my ambition is to win a second one."
