Kylian Mbappe is out to make French toast of England in their World Cup quarter-final match tonight 

The maroon door opens to reveal a scene of grinding hardship. One that typifies the existence of migrant families mired in ‘les banlieues’ — the grim city suburbs that stand testimony to the fractures in French society.

Though the woman who greets me is wearing a striking African dress and a resolute smile, she is clearly struggling to contain four of her six boisterous children in the tiny council flat, with a bedsit lounge, grease-stained kitchenette and just two bedrooms.

Consigned to this second-floor shoebox, in a tower-block in Bondy, on the northern outskirts of Paris, she and her family have modest aspirations: a bigger house, better food, decently paid jobs.

Poignantly, one of the boys says he hopes to drive a dustbin wagon when he grows up.

The incomers who were housed here before them, Wilfried Mbappe Lottin, who arrived from Cameroon, and his wife Fayza Lamari, who came from Algeria, had an altogether loftier goal.

From the moment their toddler son, Kylian, began kicking a football around the flat (‘the constant bouncing noise on my ceiling drove me half crazy,’ laughs a woman from Martinique who still lives below) they could see he had a preternatural gift for the game.

Indeed, he was so precociously talented that, even then, they began planning in earnest for the glittering career that surely awaited him when he achieved greatness.

They proved sound judges. During this World Cup, Kylian Mbappe has been hailed as the greatest player on the planet, usurping Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, whose powers are fading with age.

And if England are to progress beyond the quarter-final tonight, they will somehow have to contain the 23-year-old Frenchman’s astounding skill, speed and power.

Down the long, disillusioning years since 1966, England’s yeoman footballers have seen their World Cup hopes flounder at the feet of various geniuses. Maradona and Pele, to name but two.

Mbappe threatens to be their latest nemesis. To say he’s fast is rather like saying that nuclear missiles can be combustible. This man doesn’t just sprint, he positively explodes leaving defenders flailing in his slipstream.

After vainly trying to keep pace with him in the last round of the tournament, Aston Villa’s Polish defender Matty Cash admitted that his ‘legs burned’ with pain.

In France, Mbappe is seldom out of the headlines. Recent stories have included his dalliance with a transgender Playboy model, and his eyewatering new three-year contract with Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, reportedly worth £547 million (he agreed to sign only after President Macron pleaded with him to stay loyal to France and reject a similarly vast deal offered by Real Madrid).

Here in England, however, the new king of football remains largely unknown. So, this week, I went into the Parisian suburbs to trace his extraordinary rise and find out what kind of man we are up against.

Uplifting, intriguing, yet laced with controversy — more of which later — his story has more twists and turns than one of his mesmerising dribbles. It all begins in Bondy. The last time I was here, in 2005, the town was embroiled in the worst civil riots France has seen since the War.

Chased by the police, two French-African youths had been electrocuted when trying to hide in a sub-station, and in retaliation cars were set ablaze and buildings sacked. Whether or not Mbappe, then six years old, was scarred by these terrifying events, his family’s flat was perilously close to the flashpoints.

It stands in a street whose drabness makes a mockery of its name, which translates as Lilac Alley.

Like the present incumbents, his parents migrated from Africa to find work.

His father became a coach with the local football club, AS Bondy.

His mother, Fayza Lamari, is said to have cooked school meals, but also played professional handball and later trained as a lawyer so she could take charge of her son’s complex business affairs.

This week, as the first journalist to be invited inside the apartment where they raised Kylian, his brother Ethan, and an adoptive son, Jires Kembo Ekoko (both also footballers), I gained a fascinating insight into their tough beginnings.

The family moved out 11 years ago, yet their nameplate remains beside the security intercom. The featureless, concrete block has no lifts; you must climb a narrow, winding staircase surrounded by an iron grille.

Because it’s so small, the smell of food permeates all the rooms; the furniture is sparse; the only view comes from a small kitchen window overlooking AS Bondy’s football pitches.

As the Boy from the Banlieues grew up, it was there that his precocious talent was nurtured.

By sitting in on his father’s coaching sessions, he quickly learned the finer points of the game, but neighbours say it was his fiercely ambitious and attentive mother who really spurred him to greatness.

It certainly paid off. Today, Mbappe reclines in a £5.5 million penthouse apartment with a jacuzzi and stunning rooftop terrace, in Paris’s swanky 16th arrondissement. His boyhood apartment would probably fit inside its home-cinema.

Though he is often held up as a symbol of hope for the residents of Bondy — and has done much to better their lot, such as paying for children to have eyesight tests and spectacles, handing out free tickets to his matches, and funding new sporting facilities — his success is not celebrated by everyone.

‘Yes, it’s very nice to live in Kylian Mbappe’s flat,’ says Sedu Toure, 42, a Mali-born restaurant worker who is father to the six children.

‘But I am a bit sad that he has never once come to say ‘Hello’. My sons (Isoumaila, 11, and Samu, nine) are both mad keen on football, and they are promising strikers who play for AS Bondy, like he did. I would love to see him come and give them some encouragement.’

The two boys, who plan to watch tonight’s game on the family’s one evident luxury — a widescreen TV that dominates the living-room — don’t even have their own football.

That is not to say Mbappe doesn’t return to his roots. Momentarily departing a kickabout in one of Bondy’s many street-soccer courts, Anise Mehtal, 13, took out his mobile phone and showed me a selfie he had taken with his hero.

‘He is a great man. He has made life better here for many of us, and he is our inspiration,’ he said. ‘On some northern estates there are a lot of drugs, but here it’s football, football, football.’

Thanks to his parents’ endeavours, Mbappe was slightly better-off than most other local boys.

They were also determined to give him a rounded education, sending him to a private Roman Catholic School and enrolling him for classes in drama, swimming, tennis, and music, where he learned to play the flute.

A strict disciplinarian, his mother asked his teachers to rate his behaviour, on a written chart. When he stepped out of line — which, given his hyperactivity and mischievousness, often happened — she punished him in novel ways.

When he made fun of a fellow pupil’s old-fashioned jacket, for example she made him wear 60s-style bell-bottom trousers to school for a week. To become a fine footballer, she believed, he had to become a fine young man.

Celine Bognini, 40, who taught him to sight-read music between the ages of nine and 13, was struck by his presence on their first meeting.

‘I just remember his eyes. They were quite amazing — like the sun,’ she told me.

‘He was so happy to learn, and he asked so many questions. And he moved so gracefully, like a tiger.’

Was he a good flute player? ‘Let’s just say he was better with his feet than his hands,’ she replied tactfully.

Having spent her life living and teaching in the sink estates north of Paris, Ms Bognini has seen the children of many migrant families descend into crime and drugs.

‘If Kylian hadn’t had fantastic parents, that could easily have happened to him,’ she said. ‘They were his guardian angels.’

Before his teens, Europe’s elite clubs were clamouring for Mbappe’s signature, among them Chelsea, who apparently rejected him after a trial match when he was 11 — for the typically English reason that his incredible attacking flair was not matched by a willingness to defend.

‘Take him now, or come back when he’s 15 and pay £50 million,’ snorted his mother, presciently.

Aged 14, Mbappe’s soccer education gathered pace at Clairefontaine, France’s national football centre, 30 miles south of Paris, where he’s remembered as much for his kindness as his ability.

He didn’t tell the other boys he’d tried out for Real Madrid, for fear of upsetting those with less prowess.

When his first sponsor gave him a box of new boots, he handed them round.

Some of that year’s intake also remember him as ‘a clown’, forever playing pranks. By the same token, when it came to grasping instructions he showed high intelligence — and he was incredibly self-possessed.

When his class were told to choose a magazine and draw a cover featuring themselves as the lead item, he depicted himself — chin resting nonchalantly on hand — on the cover of ‘Time’, a publication beyond the compass of most French teenagers.

Perhaps he is as adept with a crystal-ball as a football. Because four years later, after he had become the first teenager to score twice in a World Cup match since Pele (whose slum-to-stardom backstory closely mirrors his own) and collected a winners’ medal in Russia, ‘Time’ did indeed put him on the cover.

The magazine identified the 19- year-old as one of world’s ‘future leaders’.

Today he mingles with statesmen, brokers megabucks deals with Hollywood moguls, commands a business empire and charitable foundation whose size and power seems set to eclipse those of David Beckham and perhaps even Ronaldo (his boyhood idol). His vast playing income is augmented with endorsements for a plethora of big-name brands.

An emblem of modern, multi-ethnic France, Mbappe speaks for his generation on a variety of moral and ethical issues, from racism in football to the dangers of sports gambling and alcohol.

For, as he says, he is determined to be more than ‘just the guy who shoots the ball and finishes his career, and goes to the yacht, taking his money’. Some believe he should keep quiet and play football, he says. ‘But I think not. I think the world has changed.’

Noble sentiments. No wonder teammates call him ‘Little Obama’.

But I’m sorry, Kylian, at the risk of driving you to seek vengeance on the English tonight, there’s un soupcon of hypocrisy here.

It’s all well and good leading a photo-shoot boycott of the French team’s sponsors, KFC, in protest at the health damage caused by greasy fast-food, as he did not long ago. Laudable, too, to publicise the plight of Syrian refugees via your multi-media platform, Zebra Valley; become the godfather of a panda to highlight their threatened status; and tweet concern for the latest French-African teenager claiming to have been beaten by the police.

Yet are we to imagine that your deafening silence on Qatar’s persecution of gay people, and its mistreatment of overseas workers, has nothing to do with that astonishing £547 million contract (a figure Paris Saint-Germain’s Qatari owners dismiss as inflated and ‘sensationalist’)?

Perhaps because he is in the pay of a state built with the profits from hydrocarbons, or maybe because a clause in his deal allows him free use of a private jet for 50 hours each year, Mbappe is equally quiet on climate change.

Then again, as he’s invariably accompanied on his travels by Team Kylian — an entourage including his omnipresent mother and often his father (though they have reportedly separated), two trusted legal advisers, his PR team and personal stylist, plus a hefty security detail — maybe he really needs his own plane.

He says his parents are the two people whom he completely trusts. One wonders, then, what they make of his choice of girlfriends, for his latest dalliance certainly raised a few eyebrows.

At the Cannes Film festival, last summer, he was photographed with his sinewy arms around Ines Rau, the Playboy cover-girl who three years ago came out as transgender.

The paparazzi also snapped Mbappe on a yacht with Ines, who shares his Algerian roots, and revealed how she transitioned at 16, but kept her secret for eight years. It is unclear whether their friendship is ongoing.

However, he has also been romantically teamed with Belgian-Cape Verdean model Rose Bertram, 27, and actress Emma Smet, 25, granddaughter of legendary French crooner Johnny Hallyday.

His latest girlfriend is former Miss France Alicia Aylies, 24. However, she has not flown to Qatar to watch him play leading to suggestions the on-off relationship is off again.

Critics say that his ego is beginning to get the better of him. That he reprimands his manager at PSG for perceived tactical errors or selecting the ‘wrong’ team.

That he has an unhealthy rivalry with the club’s Brazilian star, Neymar (whose £202 million transfer fee knocked him into second place in the record books): an accusation that gathered weight when they quarrelled like children over who should take a penalty.

None of this will matter one centime, of course, when Mbappe goes gunning for England tonight. Like all great performers, when he takes centre-stage the quest for perfection consumes him.

His stated ambition is chillingly clear: ‘To be the best and write history.’

We can only pray that he suffers a rare dip in form.

Otherwise, as universally predicted this week in the dismal suburb where he first kicked a ball, one fears that the brilliant Boy from the Banlieues will make French toast of England.

Additional reporting: Rory Mulholland