Mbappé's Night: From Missed Penalty to Semi-Final Success
Kylian Mbappé walked off with a grin and a place in the 2026 World Cup semi-finals. Underneath it, the irritation still burned.
France had just beaten Morocco, Mbappé had scored a brilliant opener and Ousmane Dembélé had killed the contest with a second. On paper, the Real Madrid forward had done his job. On the pitch, though, one moment kept replaying in his head: the missed penalty at 0-0.
He did not hide it.
“I took the penalty badly, but it was difficult because there was some confusion. Dembélé gave me the ball. Then the referee came over to me, just as I was starting to focus, and told me there was no penalty,” he said afterwards.
That interruption cut straight through his routine. Penalty-takers live on repetition, on habits drilled until they become instinct. This time, the script tore in his hands.
“It distracted me. I’ve gone over many scenarios in my mind about how to prepare for a penalty, but this particular situation was something I had never experienced before.”
The delay felt endless. Mbappé stood, waited, argued, waited again. The French bench fumed at the length of the review, the back-and-forth over what looked like a straightforward call. By the time the whistle finally went, the moment had a different weight. He stepped up and missed.
His reaction was instant and raw. Arms out, protests to the referee, a look of disbelief. Not at the decision this time, but at the chaos around it and his own execution.
The pressure finally told in a different way. Mbappé reset, shook off the penalty, and when the chance came in open play, he struck with the cold precision that has defined his international career. His goal broke Morocco’s resistance and changed the night’s tone. From there, Dembélé’s finish turned control into certainty and sent France through.
On the touchline, Didier Deschamps had watched the penalty saga unfold with growing irritation of his own. After the match, the France coach pointed straight at the long, tangled VAR sequence that preceded the miss.
“It seemed to me that there was a VAR review which the referee confirmed, and then there was another call to check for a possible foul. They spent almost two minutes reviewing the footage,” Deschamps said.
The stop-start nature of it all was the problem, not the technology itself.
“In the end, that uncertainty was the issue. The fact is that it took a very long time, and Kylian was already ready to take the penalty.”
Deschamps stopped short of turning it into a shield for his star.
“I’m not going to make excuses for Kylian, but obviously it was not an easy situation for him.”
That line matters. France’s dressing room runs on high standards, especially for a player of Mbappé’s stature. He knows a missed penalty at 0-0 in a World Cup quarter-final can tilt a tournament. He also knows that on this night, he found a response.
The story of the game, then, is not just the missed kick or the long VAR delay. It is the way Mbappé carried the frustration, channelled it, and still delivered the decisive blow that pushed France one step from another World Cup final.
