Mbappé: A Superstar Under Siege at Real Madrid
From a distance, it should have been the perfect marriage. Kylian Mbappé, the most devastating forward of his generation, walking into the Bernabéu on a free transfer in 2024 to restore Real Madrid’s sense of inevitability.
Two years on, the relationship is frayed, the trophies are missing, and Mbappé has become the lightning rod for a club that has forgotten how to celebrate.
Goals without glory
On paper, Mbappé has done what he was bought to do. Eighty-six goals in 103 games is an elite return in any era, for any club. At Madrid, though, numbers are only the starting point. The true currency is silver.
Since the Frenchman’s arrival, Real have failed to win a major trophy. That drought has swallowed his statistics whole. Every misstep in La Liga, every exit from Europe, has been laid at the feet of the club’s biggest star. The message from the stands and the press is simple: he doesn’t get to have quiet nights. Not here.
The first months were framed as a slow integration. Then the tone hardened. Each poor result sharpened the knives. By the end of the 2025-26 season, the atmosphere around Madrid had turned toxic.
Barcelona surged clear in the title race. Bayern Munich kicked Real out of the Champions League in the quarter-finals. Mbappé passed the 40-goal mark for the campaign, but it felt hollow, a personal milestone in a season that was collapsing around him.
His own form mirrored the team’s decline. After a blistering first half of the season, he faded. From mid-February to the final whistle in May, he scored just four times, his rhythm broken by nagging injuries and a growing sense of frustration.
Flashpoint at Valdebebas
The pressure finally boiled over in late April.
Ahead of a league meeting with Real Betis, Mbappé clashed with a member of the backroom staff at Valdebebas. During a training game, a coach flagged him offside. Mbappé responded with a volley of abuse, according to The Athletic. It was more than a petty argument; it was a snapshot of a club on edge, where tempers were short and patience had run out.
He then suffered a hamstring injury against Betis. That, in theory, should have been a moment to step back, to heal, to reset. Instead, it lit another fire.
Rather than complete his recovery at the training ground, Mbappé used some time off to fly to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photographs of the pair on a yacht surfaced just as Real Madrid were grinding through a La Liga fixture against Espanyol.
In the middle of a trophyless season, with the club under intense scrutiny, the optics were disastrous.
Inside the club, there was anger. Outside, outrage. Even as coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly defended his star, the backlash gathered pace. An online “Mbappé out” petition exploded, pulling in around 12 million signatures in under 24 hours and eventually topping 70 million. It was a digital referendum on the most famous player in the squad.
Benched, bruised and speaking out
The tension did not ease. Mbappé missed the Clásico in which Real effectively handed Barcelona the title, still deemed unfit and excusing himself from a training session for the would-be substitutes because of “discomfort”. Madrid lost the game and the league. Their talisman watched on.
He returned to the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May, a decision he clearly did not accept. After coming on as a substitute, Mbappé did something he rarely does in Spain: he stopped in the mixed zone and spoke.
He insisted he was “100 percent” fit and said he had not started because Arbeloa had told him he was now the “fourth-choice striker”. The comment detonated. For a club already drowning in noise, it was another wave crashing over the bow.
Arbeloa pushed back in his press conference, denying he had ever used that phrase.
“He must have misunderstood me, at no point did I say he was the fourth-choice striker,” the coach said. “A player who four days ago wasn’t even fit enough to make the bench for a match shouldn’t have started today.”
Behind the scenes, the mood hardened further. The Athletic reported “growing disappointment” with Mbappé “from the dressing room to the board”. His camp responded with a statement, arguing that “a portion of the criticism is based on an over-interpretation of elements related to a recovery period strictly supervised by the club, and does not reflect the reality of Kylian’s commitment and daily work for the team.”
The relationship felt brittle. The sacking of Xabi Alonso, another jolt in a chaotic season, had already unsettled Mbappé. By June, the idea of him as Madrid’s unquestioned centrepiece looked more complicated than anyone had imagined when he first walked through the door.
Escape in blue
Then came the World Cup.
Away from Valdebebas, away from the Bernabéu, away from the relentless Spanish news cycle, Mbappé has stepped back into a role that seems to fit him like a second skin.
In North America, wearing the dark blue of France, he has been ruthless. Eight goals so far. Three braces, against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden. A nerveless penalty to beat Paraguay. A stunning opener against Morocco in the quarter-finals. Even in the only game he failed to score, against Norway in the group stage, he produced two assists.
The numbers place him in exalted company. His eight goals at this tournament have him level with Lionel Messi in a dazzling Golden Boot race. Across World Cups, he now sits on 20 goals, just one behind Messi’s record tally of 21. Whether in 2026 or beyond, he is poised to stand alone at the top of that list.
There is a different energy about him with Les Bleus. Despite the depth of attacking talent at Didier Deschamps’ disposal, Mbappé is the undisputed reference point, the captain, the man everyone looks to when the game tilts towards chaos.
His team-mates have closed ranks around him, particularly after his bruising club season.
“The criticism towards him is very, very unfair,” Ousmane Dembélé said on the eve of the World Cup. “Some people go a bit too far with the criticism of Kylian. He’s an incredible player and a very good person off the pitch.
“Some people overdo the criticism because he’s Kylian Mbappé. They shouldn’t keep going after him. Whether he ties his shoelaces or not, whether he pulls up his socks or not... it’s too much. He’s still a human being. With the France team, he’s very good with us, he’s a leader.”
Defender Lucas Hernandez echoed the sentiment.
“Kylian is an extraordinary player. When you’re Kylian Mbappé, everyone looks at everything you do, on the pitch and off the pitch. All the criticism there has been this season, he’s going to silence it.”
So far, Mbappé is doing exactly that.
Spain’s sceptical gaze
Back in Spain, the picture is more layered than a simple love-hate narrative.
Questions over his leadership, ego and off-field decisions sit alongside respect for his goals, his decisiveness, his ability to bend games to his will. He is a global superstar operating in a country whose record on the treatment of black players is, at best, uneven. That context cannot be stripped away from the way he is discussed and dissected.
“In Spain, we are famous for making stories out of the little that we see of players,” Spanish journalist Guillem Balagué told the BBC in May. “The jury remains out with Mbappé. He seems a little bit too cold and too distant with the Madrid fans – I remember Raúl telling me that one thing they appreciate is players running for the impossible ball. People love it.
“Of course, if Real were winning, it would be a different story. The question is, are they not winning because the managers haven’t been able to get the best out of Mbappé, or because he is not adapting quick enough?”
Balagué pointed back to Mbappé’s early months under Carlo Ancelotti, when the forward arrived with “complete humbleness”, did what he was told and still delivered goals. Then came a turning point: two missed penalties, against Liverpool and Athletic Club. Confidence wobbled, and Mbappé decided to “do it my own way”. The goals kept coming, but this season, under Alonso and then Arbeloa, the chemistry has evaporated.
The debate around him in Spain is not going away. It might even intensify.
A semi-final with layers
Now comes a World Cup semi-final against Spain, the country he calls home for most of the year, the country whose media has taken a scalpel to his every move.
Mbappé is exactly where he wants to be: in form, in the spotlight, chasing history. He knows the stakes. He also knows the rules of the game.
“There is only one scenario where you can relax and that is winning the World Cup,” he said before the showdown. “When you play for France, if you don’t win, you get heavily criticised. We have a tightly-knit squad driving toward a single objective: victory.
“We are in the semi-finals, but the road is still long, and the most challenging matches lie ahead of us.”
He has already used this tournament to answer some of his critics. To remind people that beneath the headlines and petitions and yacht photos, there is still the same ruthless finisher who dragged France to a World Cup title and then to another final.
If he now sends the European champions home, on a stage this big, and carries that same ferocity back to Madrid, the conversation in Spain will have to shift.
The question is not whether his detractors owe him an apology. It is whether they are ready to accept a version of Mbappé who conquers the world in blue – and then comes back to finish what he started in white.
