Kylian Mbappe has spent five-and-a-half seasons playing for Paris Saint-Germain and these are the French club’s statistics in Ligue 1 during that time — played 202, won 149, drawn 27, lost 26. Goals for 519, against 172.

The 24-year-old has won the league easily every season he has been at the club, apart from in 2021 when Lille squeezed PSG out by a point.

It looks like it has been a fun ride for a kid with a smile as wide as the Seine. Mbappe, born in the Paris suburbs, has scored almost a goal a game and more than a quarter of that huge total of 519. In doing so he has established himself as one of the world’s elite players.

But there comes a time in everyone’s life when the fun has to stop and the real work must begin. That time feels like now for Mbappe, a forward who simply cannot continue to take free hits forever.

Mbappe was marvellous at the World Cup. His club mate Lionel Messi somehow managed to outdo him in that ‘I was there’ final in Doha but Mbappe was, in my opinion, the best player of the tournament.

He has a World Cup winner’s medal already. He scored in France’s 2018 final win over Croatia in Moscow. He was still a teenager then.

So Mbappe is a genuine global star, one of football’s really big fish, but he is now in danger of drowning in French football’s desperately shallow pond. A move to the Premier League (please, yes) or Spain’s La Liga should be his next step.

It would improve his status but more importantly it would improve his football. French football is not competitive, not remotely. Just look at the way PSG’s domestic season started last July — it went 4-0, 5-0, 5-2, 7-1.

But this week, when the Champions League began to get serious, they flunked it. Tuesday’s 1-0 home defeat to Bayern Munich, that Mbappe started on the bench, appears to have set PSG up for another exit. In 12 years of Qatar ownership, PSG have been to just one final, in the Covid season of 2020, and lost.

Some will argue it’s just one of those strange anomalies, similar to that which tells us Manchester City have not won the Champions League either. But it’s not that. It’s not remotely that. The French league does not prepare its champions for the hike in standards presented by European football’s elite competition.

How can it? Playing a series of easy games week in, week out, sometimes against under-strength teams fielded by opponents who know they literally cannot win, and then running into Bayern, City or Real Madrid is the sporting equivalent of playing Sunday League cricket all year and then being asked to open the batting in an Ashes series.

PSG can be marvellous to watch moving forward. How can they not be? Messi and Brazilian golden child Neymar also play for them. So does the talented Italian Marco Verratti. But they always seem to be a team without a real soul, without a heartbeat. So when it comes to it, when a step up in class and character is called for, they come up short.

We know why Messi is there. It’s the last lucrative staging post for the 35-year-old before the American MLS.

Neymar? He has been wrapped up in his own bubble of vanity for so long that it’s impossible to know what he thinks, or indeed who it is who is actually doing his thinking for him. I lost all interest in him ages ago.

But Mbappe strikes me as somebody different to all of that. I loved watching him play in Qatar. I loved the way he almost won his country a World Cup from nowhere almost on his own. I loved his spirit, his ambition and his freedom.

He is a wonderful footballer but he also strikes me as a serious footballer. And serious footballers should be fronting up defenders from the really top clubs as often as possible.

Mbappe at Old Trafford or Anfield or Stamford Bridge sounds mouth-watering and it should feel that way to him too. Ditto the Nou Camp or Bernabeu.

There is always politics at PSG. That dressing room sounds like a cesspit. But this is not about that. It’s not about escaping the poison. It’s more fundamental. It’s about sporting credibility.

If Mbappe wishes to hang on to his, he needs to plot a route out of Paris towards a proper league before it’s too late.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk