Kylian Mbappé: A Superstar Under Siege at Real Madrid
Kylian Mbappé is scoring like a legend and living like a villain.
From a distance, his move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid in 2024 looked like a coronation. A free transfer for a global superstar, 86 goals in 103 games, the new face of the Bernabéu era. On paper, it is a roaring success.
Inside Spain, it feels like a slow-motion crisis.
A superstar under siege
Madrid have not lifted a major trophy since Mbappé walked through the door. That failure has swallowed his numbers whole. Every big name at the club has taken hits, but Mbappé has become the lightning rod, the convenient symbol of a project that has stalled.
He does not get to have an average night. If he drifts, if he misfires, the headlines sharpen. Early on, the criticism circled around his adaptation, his positioning, his chemistry with the rest of the front line. Once the results turned, the mood darkened.
The 2025-26 season broke something. Real Madrid fell away from Barcelona in the title race and went out in the Champions League quarter-finals to Bayern Munich. Mbappé still finished with more than 40 goals, but his second half of the campaign sagged: just four strikes from mid-February to the end, with minor injuries nibbling at his rhythm.
The numbers remained impressive. The feeling did not.
Training ground flashpoint and Sardinia storm
As Real’s season unravelled, the atmosphere around the club curdled. Mbappé found himself right in the middle of it.
According to The Athletic, the 27-year-old clashed with a member of the backroom staff before a late-April match against Real Betis. In a training game, a coach flagged him offside. Mbappé’s response was a volley of abuse, a flash of temper that summed up a dressing room on edge.
He then picked up a hamstring injury against Betis. Instead of staying at Valdebebas to work his way back, he used his time off to fly to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photos of the pair on a yacht surfaced as Real Madrid were facing Espanyol in La Liga.
The images landed badly. Inside the club, eyebrows shot up. Outside, the reaction was ferocious. Coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly backed his star, but it did little to stem the tide. An “Mbappé out” online petition exploded, racking up around 12 million signatures in under 24 hours and eventually passing 70 million. It was the digital version of the Bernabéu’s whistle.
He missed the Clásico that effectively handed Barcelona the title, still considered unfit. Mbappé excused himself from training with the likely substitutes, citing “discomfort”. He returned to the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May.
That is when he snapped.
“Fourth-choice striker” and a public rupture
Mbappé, who usually glides past the mixed zone in silence, stopped to talk. After coming on as a substitute, he told reporters he was “100 percent” fit and claimed Arbeloa had informed him he was now the “fourth-choice striker”.
The words detonated.
Arbeloa was forced to respond in his press conference, peppered with questions about the star forward. He denied demoting Mbappé down the pecking order.
“He must have misunderstood me, at no point did I say he was the fourth-choice striker,” Arbeloa 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 Athletic reported “growing disappointment” with Mbappé, stretching from the dressing room to the boardroom. His camp pushed back, insisting that part of the criticism stemmed from “over-interpretation” of a recovery period that had been “strictly supervised by the club” and did not reflect his “commitment and daily work for the team”.
The damage, though, was obvious. The relationship between Madrid’s new icon and the Spanish media felt fractured, his every gesture now a talking point, every decision a test of loyalty.
Escape to North America
The World Cup arrived like a release valve.
Away from the deafening noise of Madrid, Mbappé has looked like himself again in North America: ruthless, electric, utterly at ease in the dark blue of France. Eight goals so far, dragging Les Bleus towards another shot at glory.
He has scored braces against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden. He tucked away a winner from the penalty spot against Paraguay. He produced a stunning opener against Morocco in the quarter-finals. Only Norway have kept him from scoring, and even then he created two goals.
His eight-goal haul puts him level with Lionel Messi in a dazzling Golden Boot race. Across World Cups, he now stands on 20 goals, just one behind Messi’s 21. The all-time record is suddenly within reach, whether in 2026 or beyond.
In this environment, he is not just another superstar. He is France’s captain, their undisputed talisman, the reference point for a squad packed with talent. The hierarchy is clear. The trust is total.
“He’s still a human being”
Inside the France camp, there is no appetite for the Spanish storm that follows Mbappé around.
“The criticism towards him is very, very unfair,” Ousmane Dembélé said on the eve of the tournament. “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 that view.
“Kylian is an extraordinary player. When you’re Kylian Mbappé, everyone looks at everything you do, on the pitch and off the pitch,” he said. “All the criticism there has been this season, he’s going to silence it.”
So far, Mbappé has done exactly that.
Spain’s split verdict
Inside Spain, the picture is more complicated than a simple love-hate narrative.
Questions linger over his leadership, his ego, his behaviour away from the pitch. Those doubts sit alongside the cold reality of his attacking output and his knack for deciding games. He is a global superstar in a league that often devours its own, and he is a Black player in a country with a troubled record on racism in football. That context cannot be ignored.
“In Spain, we are famous for making stories out of the little that we see of players,” Spanish journalist Guillem Balague 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 Raul 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?”
Balague pointed back to Mbappé’s early months under Carlo Ancelotti, when the forward, he said, showed “complete humbleness” and did what he was told. Then came a wobble: two missed penalties against Liverpool and Athletic Club, a dip that reportedly led Mbappé to decide, “I am going to do it my own way.” The goals followed, the numbers soared, but this season under Xabi Alonso and then Arbeloa, the chemistry has not clicked.
Facing Spain, playing for himself
Now comes a World Cup semi-final against Spain, the country where he lives and works, the place that has spent two years picking him apart.
Mbappé knows the stakes. “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 speaks like a man who understands the bargain. At Madrid, at France, at this level, the goals are never enough on their own. The scrutiny is permanent. The criticism is the tax.
Yet this is his stage. A semi-final against the European champions, in the country that has questioned his character, his commitment, even his holidays. Mbappé is in irresistible form, chasing records, chasing another World Cup, chasing a different kind of respect.
If he sends Spain home and carries this version of himself back to Madrid, the same commentators who signed him off as a problem will have to look again.
And if he keeps scoring at this rate, how long can even his fiercest critics pretend not to see the best striker in the world playing in their own backyard?
