Kylian Mbappe just became the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer, and the box score still says France lost 6-4.
Sky Sports reported Saturday’s third-place match in Miami finished as the highest-scoring World Cup game since 1982, and for most of the first half, England looked like it was playing a different sport. Declan Rice scored inside three minutes, Ezri Konsa headed home a Rice corner, and Bukayo Saka struck twice before the whistle. England went into the locker room up 4-0 on a France team the entire tournament had been built around one man.
Then the second half happened, and it got complicated.
Mbappe pulled one back in the 48th minute with a side-footed finish. Bradley Barcola snapped in a near-post strike six minutes later; by the hour mark, France had cut the deficit to two goals, and Hard Rock Stadium had gone from a coronation to an actual football match.
Mbappe scored again in the 66th, working a give-and-go with Michael Olise before finishing it himself. It was his 22nd career World Cup goal, one more than Messi ever scored, and it made him, as of Saturday, the leading scorer in tournament history. I watched that finish four times and it still doesn’t look like it should have mattered as little as it did.
BBC’s Match of the Day posted the moment:
https://twitter.com/BBCMOTD/status/2078609800108097822
Saka completed his hat-trick in the 87th minute, converting a penalty won when Malo Gusto fouled Djed Spence in the box, the fourth hat-trick by an Englishman in World Cup history. Dembele curled one back for France in second-half stoppage time to make it 5-4, and for a moment the bronze match looked like it might turn into an actual heist. It wasn’t enough.
Jude Bellingham sealed it two minutes later with his seventh World Cup goal, the most any England player has scored in a single tournament, and the final score read 6-4, England’s best World Cup finish since they won it all in 1966. Mbappe produced the two biggest individual moments of the match and still watched the other team celebrate.
Didier Deschamps called France’s first half “catastrophic,” which undersold it. Mbappe sounded less interested in his own record than the game he’d rather have been playing. He told Fox Sports afterward: “I would have preferred not to be the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history and instead be able to play in the World Cup final tomorrow.”
Of Messi, a kickoff away from his own final, he added: “Tomorrow he will score for sure.” Messi gets to find out. Mbappe is already home. This is the second straight World Cup that’s ended with Mbappe as the best player on the field and nothing to show for it.
Greatest scorer in World Cup history. Still lost the game that mattered.
