Kylian Mbappé has just entered a little further into the league of the very great. With his double with PSG on Tuesday evening in Barcelona during the victory (4-1) of the capital club and qualification for the semi-finals of the Champions League, the captain of the French team opened the doors to the top 10 best scorers in the history of the competition.
At kick-off, Kylian Mbappé was at the gates of this top 10 with 46 goals. But a penalty (61st) and a goal after a counter later (89th) and here is “Kyk’s” with 48 units in 71 matches. He thus overtakes Filippo Inzaghi and his 46 goals to join the Ukrainian Andriy Shevchenko and the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovic in joint 9th place in this ranking. At 25, the PSG native reached this symbolic threshold, seven years after scoring his first goal in C1. It was February 21, 2017, in the round of 16 return on the Manchester City field under the colors of Monaco. That season, Mbappé would finish with six goals in the Champions League, before signing for Paris Saint-Germain.
In the Parisian jersey, Mbappé scored goals in European competition. First four in each of his first two seasons, then five, then eight during the 2020-2021 season. A total that he reached thanks to his hat-trick at the Camp Nou against Barça. The following season, Mbappé scored six times, then seven times last season. For the current season, certainly his last in Paris, the Frenchman has eight goals, equaling his record in a single edition of the Champions League.
The top 5 is still very far away
The Parisian will have the opportunity to surpass this mark in the semi-final against Dortmund in early May. He will then be able to go for the eighth top scorer in the Champions League. A certain Thierry Henry, author of 50 goals with Monaco, Arsenal and Barcelona between 1997 and 2009. Then, Mbappé can still hope to surpass Thomas Müller's 54 goals and Ruud Van Nistelrooy's 56 quite quickly, but he will need a lot more time to reach the top 5 made up of Raùl (71 goals), Karim Benzema (90), Robert Lewandowski (94), Lionel Messi (129) and Cristiano Ronaldo (140).