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          French crop: PSG's Mbappe debuts new blue hairdo, Barcelona's Griezmann rocks braids

          • Chris Wright, Toe Poke writerDec 17, 2020, 02:00 PM

          Ahead of their midweek club fixtures, both Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann debuted dramatic new hairstyles before taking to the pitch with Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona respectively.

          Mbappe ventured out of the tunnel ahead of PSG's game against Lorient sporting a flashy dye job which he had first introduced completely out of the blue on Instagram shortly before kick-off.

          Was the fact the 21-year-old was perched on the edge of a pool table a nod to his new hair colour? It wouldn't be a surprise to discover the label on the dye bottle was "cue chalk blue."

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          Still, Mbappe's new look proved to be an instant winner as the 21-year-old striker scored a penalty in a straightforward 2-0 victory for the Ligue 1 champions, enabling him to bust out a new goal celebration.

          Mbappe's fellow France international and 2018 World Cup winner Griezmann followed suit as Barca took on Real Sociedad at Camp Nou, having tamed his increasingly unkempt locks into a pair of sleek plaited braids -- channeling his inner Alpine milkmaid.

          Griezmann's grand premiere was slightly less memorable. He lasted 66 minutes, eventually being replaced by young Portuguese winger Francisco Trincao for the final stretch of Barca's 2-1 win, although not before he was culpable for a quite unbelievable miss.

          Mbappe and Griezmann are hardly the first stars who have dropped surprise new hairdos on us:

          Neymar

          PSG have a long and proud tradition of their strikers suddenly appearing with neon hair. Indeed, who can forget when Neymar turned bright pink earlier this year?

          Cristiano Ronaldo

          From top-knots to Alice bands, Ronaldo has cycled through more hair overhauls than we care to remember -- but perhaps the starkest was when he paid a follicular tribute to his Juventus teammate Juan Cuadrado.

          Lionel Messi

          There was a time when you could rely on Messi to have a sensible, if fairly unremarkable haircut. Then he went and bleached it in 2016, and Barcelona haven't won the Champions League since. Coincidence? Yes.

          Paul Pogba

          The Manchester United midfielder has had so many different hairstyles that more than two dozen made it into our Paul Pogba hairstyle Power Rankings, but his tribute to Batman from his time at Juventus (Pogba, not The Caped Crusader) gets the nod here.

          Ronaldo

          Perhaps the most memorable instance of a footballer's hairstyle-grabbing headlines all around the world, the striker's bizarre crop during Brazil's victorious 2002 World Cup campaign is still being debated by academics to this very day.

          David Beckham

          Before Cristiano Ronaldo, football's king of the hairstyle reinvention we freely admit that he is an achingly stylish guy -- but even he was never immune to the odd faux pas.