Kylian Mbappé - 200 goals for PSG, and rising very fast | OneFootball

Kylian Mbappé is a young man in a hurry. A World Cup winner as a teenager, he has just equalled Edinson Cavani’s tally of 200 goals for Paris Saint-Germain and will very soon claim that club record all for himself. Ligue1.com looks back at some milestones on the way to his double century.

Cavani, who played with Mbappé for three years at the Parc des Princes before leaving in 2020, needed just 298 games in a PSG shirt to reach 200 goals in seven seasons at the club. The Uruguayan had already left Zlatan Ibrahimovic trailing in his wake after the Swede had departed in 2016 with 156 goals in 180 matches.

Signed from AS Monaco in August 2017, Mbappé  has needed a mere 246 matches in five and a half years to get to 200, a figure he appropriately reached against PSG’s great rivals Olympique de Marseille by scoring twice in the 3-0 win at the Orange Vélodrome last weekend.

The landmark comes just a couple of months after he left Qatar as the top scorer at the World Cup with eight goals, meaning he has now matched Pelé’s total of 12 goals at the tournament. At this rate, and at his age, he surely has Miroslav Klose’s men’s World Cup record of 16 goals in his sights.

While we are comparing Mbappé with his peers, here is another comparison: it took Lionel Messi more than 300 games for Barcelona to get to 200 goals. Messi last week reached 700 career club goals when he netted against Marseille after being set up by Mbappé. The boy from Bondy, still aged just 24, looks like he could better even Messi’s goals record if he carries on like this.

“He has equalled what is a wonderful record, and Edinson is in our thoughts. He is now going to beat the record and he is surely the best attacking player in the world. He is quick, he does everything fast and he turns up in big games,” was how Paris coach Christophe Galtier summed up Mbappé last week.

Here are some of his milestones en route to that magic number of 200:

First goal on debut

After arriving from Monaco just before the transfer window closed in August 2017, Mbappé was given his Paris debut by Unai Emery away at FC Metz on September 8. Playing just behind Cavani and alongside fellow new arrival Neymar Jr, Mbappé marked his first game for his new club by scoring his first goal in a 5-1 victory.

Four goals against Lyon

Looking back, Mbappé’s first season in Paris was almost a little tame by his current standards. He scored 21 goals in that 2017-18 campaign. Then came the World Cup in Russia, when as a 19-year-old he scored in the final to help France clinch a 4-2 win over Croatia in Moscow. Returning to Paris, he was now a world champion and ready to confirm that he belonged at the next level permanently. By early October 2018, Mbappé had yet to score a hat-trick in a PSG shirt, but then came the visit of Olympique Lyonnais to the Parc des Princes. Paris crushed one of their great rivals 5-0 and Mbappé scored four of the goals, all in the space of 14 mind-blowing second-half minutes.

The first hundred up

It took Mbappé three years and three months to get to 100 goals in a Paris shirt. Perhaps he would have got there sooner had the 2019-20 season not been forced to end prematurely because of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. He reached his first century in December 2020 as he found the net after coming on as a late substitute for Thomas Tuchel’s team in a 3-1 victory away to Montpellier Hérault SC.

Hat-trick in Barcelona

Mbappé’s signature European performance so far came in Barcelona in the first leg of a heavyweight UEFA Champions League last-16 tie in February 2021. The tie was played behind closed doors due to pandemic restrictions but the importance of the occasion was not lost on PSG on their first visit to the Camp Nou since a humbling 6-1 loss there in 2017.

Messi put Barcelona ahead from the penalty spot, but Mbappé got the equaliser before the break and added two more in the second half. Moise Kean also scored in a stunning 4-1 victory, and a 1-1 draw at home in the return took Mauricio Pochettino’s side through to the quarter-finals.

A rare header

Remarkably, only four of Mbappé’s goals for PSG have been scored with his head. Here is one of them, in a 2-0 win at Stade de Reims on the night Messi made his debut for the club in August 2021.

Matching the record

And so we come to the moment when Mbappé matched Cavani and got to 200 goals for PSG. After opening the scoring and then setting up Messi to make it 2-0, Mbappé clinched a comprehensive 3-0 victory in Marseille with this superb controlled volleyed effort early in the second half at the Vélodrome last weekend.

>> STATATTACK: Mbappé equals Cavani goal record