I knew he would score,” said Ethan Mbappé the day after his older brother’s full Champions League debut for Monaco against Manchester City last month. “He told me he would get a hat-trick but one is still pretty good for an 18 year old.”

It took only eight minutes of the second leg at the Stade Louis II for Kylian Mbappé to show why Ethan, seven years his junior, clearly has so much faith in his sibling. Another goal as Pep Guardiola’s expensive squad were sent crashing out of Europe’s premier club competition was followed by two more the following weekend against Caen in Ligue 1 to make it 12 in 10 games.

Mbappé had become the youngest player to score 13 goals in Ligue 1 for 30 years, usurping a certain Thierry Henry, despite making only 12 league starts under Leonardo Jardim. He wasn’t finished there. Last Wednesday, as the football world came to terms with the bomb attack on the Borussia Dortmund team bus less than 24 hours earlier, Mbappé put on an irresistible display of pace, power and finishing to become the youngest player to score twice in a Champions League knockout tie as he helped Monaco establish a 3-2 lead in the first leg of their quarter-final.

“Pour une France qui met des doublés (For a France that makes doubles). Kylian 2017,” read a mocked-up poster that did the rounds the next day on social media, suggesting there could be only one choice for the presidential election. But as the son of a Cameroon-born father and with a mother of Algerian heritage who was once a professional handball player, it would be hard to find a better person to represent the antithesis of Marine Le Pen and Front National’s anti-immigration agenda.

Born in Bondy, a town in the sprawling northern banlieues of Paris that was an epicentre of four weeks of rioting in 2005, Mbappé’s career has been meticulously managed by his family. Having joined AS Bondy – where his father, Wilfried, was a coach – at the age of six, the player now coveted by all of Europe’s top sides moved to the French Football Federation’s finishing school at Clairefontaine when he was 13.

“When he started, it was clear he had something,” Wilfried Mbappé told France Football last year. “We started to say: ‘Oh, la la!’ but without imagining he could make a career.”

Inspiration, however, was close at hand. A few years before Mbappé was born, Jirès Kembo-Ekoko, whose father had represented Zaire at the 1974 World Cup, was sent to live with his uncle in France and was subsequently taken under Wilfried’s wing at AS Bondy. A talented striker, he was selected to attend Clairefontaine and went on to earn his first professional contract at Rennes, as well as appearing for France’s Under-21 side. “Kylian’s first idol was me,” Kembo-Ekoko, who now plays in Dubai for Al-Nasr, told France Football. “When I was in Clairefontaine or Rennes, he was always with me.”

Mbappé’s exploits as a teenager soon caught the attention of the French media. Asked in an interview with Libération in 2014 what his ambition was, the 14-year-old replied: “To play for Real Madrid. It is better to target the moon. That way, if you fail, you get to the clouds.”

But despite having the opportunity to join Real as well as Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool and Bayern Munich among others, Mbappé chose Monaco. The fleet-footed forward’s performances for their under-19s the following season – he scored at least twice in six successive games – saw him promoted to the reserve team.

“During an international break, the coach sent him with the pros,” remembered Wilfried last year. “Since then, he has not been released. It has been a rapid evolution, but has not come out of a hat …”

Having broken another of Henry’s records when he made his debut aged 16 years and 347 days in December 2015, Mbappé scored his first senior goal two months later before helping Monaco to victory over Lens in the final of the Coupe Gambardella, France’s national under-19 competition.

“Everybody said he would be a phenomenon since he was very young and you could see why,” recalls Julien Maynard, a journalist for the French TV channel TF1 who was at the match that day. “It’s hard to put into words but when he has the ball, anything can happen. I follow a lot of young players and you could tell Kylian was a very special talent.”

Used sparingly at first by Jardim at the start of the season, Mbappé has become an integral part of Europe’s most potent attacking team as the months have passed. But it was the hat-trick against Kembo-Ekoko’s former club Rennes in a League Cup tie just before Christmas that was the catalyst for his sparkling form in 2017.

Kylian Mbappé has fun during training for Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final second leg against Dortmund. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

“He is very mature and intelligent. That’s why he has been so successful so far,” says Maynard, who conducted the rising star’s first interview for national television a few days after the Rennes match. “His family has played a very important role in his career because there is a very professional link between Kylian and his parents. Maybe it’s because of the influence of his ‘older brother’ and fact they have already been through the experience of raising a young player and all the pressure that comes with it.”

Boasting the best record in Europe in terms of minutes per goal or assist – ahead of even Lionel Messi – this season, the only surprise about his first appearances for France’s senior team in March was his failure to score. But the video of his initiation ceremony, where Mbappé chose to sing C’est plus l’heure by Franglish, showed a young man extremely comfortable in his new surroundings.

NEW: an Easter update to the most productive attackers in European football. Mbappé mixing it with the elite, and Dele Alli creeping in too pic.twitter.com/wXsytfmcBn — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 16, 2017

Along with Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembélé, Kingsley Coman of Bayern Munich and Manchester United’s Anthony Martial, France is brimming with emerging forward talent and Maynard believes it is a credit to their youth development system.

“It is a fantastic generation,” he says. “The common point between these players is they are all intelligent. They know very well what they want and have a very professional approach. They are young but very mature.”

All of the attention on Mbappé has also inevitably brought his younger brother into the spotlight. The star player of Bondy’s Under-11 side, Ethan has been scouted by some of France’s biggest clubs and his parents are keen to protect their youngest son from a media frenzy. But if, as expected, Kylian ends up leaving Monaco this summer for a fee that could end up being more than £80m despite only two years remaining on his contract, they will just have to get used it.