The day France and Real Madrid striker Kylian Mbappe played his very first professional match - 'I didn't think he'd become a superstar'

It is the final international break of the year. We are in November 2015. At Monaco, Bernardo Silva, Joao Moutinho, Fabio Coentrao, Ricardo Carvalho, Nabil Dirar and Danijel Subasic have all left to join up with their national teams.

But on The Rock (Monaco), the work continues around Andrea Raggi and the rest of the squad. Naturally, with the internationals away, they are short on numbers. On this particular day, Leonardo Jardim's squad needs an extra body to fill out the ranks.

They look to the youth ranks below. A 16-year-old kid arrives. A bit frail. His name? Kylian Mbappe Lottin, and he is about to cause absolute havoc. At the end of the session, they play a small training match.

The highly experienced Raggi is tasked with marking the young Mbappe. "I don't think he knew who he was," recalled Sebastien Amoros, a team-mate at the time. "He discovered him that day, and it gave him a real headache because [Mbappe] put him through the ringer! After training, Raggi usually liked to have a quick smoke. I think he must have smoked two or three that day."

Speaking to L’Équipe, Mbappe recalled the behind-the-scenes story of how he ended up in that session: "I wasn't actually supposed to train with the pros. But at the last minute, they were short a player, so I was moved up with them."

He caught everyone's eye so completely that Leonardo Jardim asked if he was a new signing. Mbappe's response: "I told him I’d already been there for three years. He told me to come back the next day and asked for my father's contact details. From that point on, I never left the first-team group. At first, the players were asking me if I was on trial and what club I’d come from. When I told them I was 16, they were a bit shocked - they thought I was three years older!"

Former Monaco midfielder Tiemoue Bakayoko was close to Mbappe at the time, notably remembering a few heavy defeats he handed him while playing FIFA on PlayStation. "When I think of Kylian, I think of pure confidence - sheer audacity," he says. "He always had serious nerve, no matter who he was facing.

"He was only 15 or 16, but he wanted to prove he belonged there, that he had the level. He was a kid who feared nothing. Incredibly talented, head and shoulders above his age group. And Raggi secretly wanted to test him, but secretly and in a constructive way. When you come up against the veterans, there are things you aren't supposed to do, but Kylian didn't care." He sums it up: "It’s a mindset above all else."

It has already been more than 10 years since Mbappe's professional career began - a period that has been anything but quiet for the Bondy native. The story between Mbappe and Monaco started back in 2013, when his family chose Monaco over a host of heavyweight suitors, including Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea (whom he visited aged 12), Real Madrid (where Zinedine Zidane personally welcomed him) and even Paris Saint-Germain.

Monaco was the next step after the Clairefontaine academy, where, as he would later note in an interview with Le Monde: "At Clairefontaine, Gerard Precheur used to say that every footballer hits a wall at some point, but the real question is, 'How will he get back up?' For me, I hit that wall the moment I arrived at Monaco's academy. And right then, I realised he wasn't wrong - he was a visionary."

The feeling of always being a cut above the rest - which had been the case since his days at AS Bondy - was over. In the Principality, he had to prove himself.

For that 2015–16 season, a young Kylian was playing with the reserve team in National 2. He was getting game time but he wasn't exactly tearing the league apart every weekend. Observers at the time even noted that he adapted to Ligue 1 much faster than he did to the physical realities of the fourth tier.

In early December, Mbappe was named in Leonardo Jardim's squad for the home match against Stade Malherbe Caen. It was a must-win game against Nicolas Seube, Andy Delort and company to sustain their climb up the table after a sluggish start to the campaign. Indeed, Monaco had been sitting in ninth place after 13 matchdays and were seventh just before squaring off against Caen.

Guido Carrillo opened the scoring just before the hour mark but Ronny Rodelin silenced the Stade Louis-II with an equaliser four minutes from time. In a bid to snatch all three points, Jardim threw on Mbappe to replace Coentrao.

Ultimately, it didn't yield a winner. But at 16 years, 11 months and 13 days old, Mbappe became the youngest player in Monaco's history to feature in a professional match, eclipsing the club record held by a certain Thierry Henry. "Kylian has immense potential but still has a lot of work to do before reaching the highest level," Jardim stated at the time. "I have always believed that talent doesn't wait on age."

"The thing that shocked me the most," Bakayoko told Eurosport, "was his professional debut. That was the exact moment I told myself, 'We've got a massive gemstone here.'"

Was this just a fleeting appearance, a one-off runout to give him a taste of the top flight? Not quite. Eight days later, Monaco were collapsing against Tottenham in the Europa League, trailing 3-0 after just 38 minutes.

Before the hour mark, Jardim hauled off Lacina Traore to throw Mbappe into the fray. Less than five minutes later, sharing the pitch with the likes of Erik Lamela and Son Heung-min, he provided an assist for Stephan El Shaarawy to grab a consolation goal in an eventual 4-1 defeat. "He comes on out wide," Bakayoko recalls. "He absolutely tears the defender apart, gets an assist... After that, I knew he was going to go far."

His first start arrived against Evian-Thonon-Gaillard in the Coupe de France in January 2016, followed by his first Ligue 1 goal in late February against Troyes (3-1). Yet it was not all completely smooth sailing.

While he was discovering senior football on the pitch, the incredibly thorny issue of his first professional contract was dominating conversations back in Monaco. Mbappe was still only on a youth academy agreement and ASM knew exactly how much they stood to lose if they failed to strike a deal with their prized asset and his representatives.

At the time, Le Journal du Dimanche reported that Monaco had tabled a €1 million signing-on fee. By March, the heavyweight suitors were circling once again. L'Equipe claimed that PSG, Real Madrid, Arsenal and Bayern Munich were all waiting in the wings to pull off the heist of the century.

However, after intense and seemingly endless negotiations that dragged on for months, Mbappe committed his future to ASM until 2019. "This is the club that helped me grow, the club that developed me," he explained in a video posted by ASM at the time, sporting a Nike cap and speaking in that already instantly recognisable tone of voice. "I hope I can keep pushing through as many milestones as possible."

Behind the scenes, Mbappe remained relaxed, living his dream to the fullest with that youthful carefree nature still intact. "He's more than just passionate; he's a fanatic," his father, Wilfrid Mbappe, told France Football back then. "I work in the industry myself and he almost makes me sick of it because he lives and breathes it 25 hours a day. He watches everything. He has always wanted to learn from his idols, especially with the rise of the internet, YouTube and video games. He was capable of watching four or five matches in a row."

On the pitch, the hype began as a slow burn. But the phenomenon would truly explode onto the global stage in early 2017 at the Etihad Stadium, during a breathless UEFA Champions League round-of-16 clash against Manchester City, which the Premier League side won 5-3.

"He took on an international dimension. He blew me away," Bakayoko concludes with a smile. "Now, as for him going this far... I didn't necessarily think back then that he’d become a global superstar, the guy we'd talk about right after Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. But right now, that's exactly the direction he's heading..."

The rest, as they say, is history.

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