Kylian Mbappé: From Crisis at Madrid to World Cup Stardom
Kylian Mbappé is scoring like a legend at this World Cup. Back in Spain, he’s living like a villain.
From a distance, the numbers look absurd: 86 goals in 103 games since walking into the Bernabéu on a free from Paris Saint-Germain in 2024. For most clubs, that’s a decade-defining signing doing exactly what he was bought to do.
For Real Madrid, it has become Exhibit A in a case for the prosecution.
No league title since he arrived. No Champions League. No major trophy at all. In the unforgiving glare of the Spanish capital, Mbappé’s output has been swallowed by the narrative of a superclub stuck in neutral, and the Frenchman has become the lightning rod for all of it. At Madrid, he doesn’t just have to be brilliant. He has to be brilliant every three days. Anything less and the knives come out.
From slow burn to full-blown crisis
The early debates were football ones. How quickly would he adapt? Where should he play? Was he stepping on too many toes? A slow integration was tolerated at first.
That patience vanished as the results soured.
Each defeat, each limp cup exit, sharpened the tone. By the end of the 2025-26 season, the atmosphere around Madrid was toxic. Barcelona had disappeared over the horizon in La Liga. Bayern Munich had bundled them out of the Champions League in the quarter-finals. Mbappé still cleared the 40-goal mark, but his season told a harsher story: a blistering first half, then a second half of the campaign where his influence faded badly.
From mid-February to the end of the season, he scored only four times, his rhythm broken by niggling injuries. For a normal forward, that’s a dip. For Mbappé at Madrid, it became ammunition.
The pressure finally boiled over during the run-in. The team were unraveling on the pitch; off it, the club felt like a pressure cooker.
According to The Athletic, Mbappé clashed with a member of the backroom staff before a late-April game against Real Betis, unloading a volley of abuse at a coach who had flagged him offside in a training match. It was a small moment, but a telling one, a snapshot of a dressing room on edge and a star striker fraying at the seams.
He then suffered a hamstring injury against Betis. What happened next poured petrol on the fire.
Rather than stay at Valdebebas to work on his recovery, Mbappé took time off to holiday in Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photos of the couple on a yacht surfaced while Real Madrid were playing Espanyol in La Liga. The optics could not have been worse.
Inside the club, there was anger. Outside, outrage. While coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly defended his player, an “Mbappé out” online petition exploded, racking up around 12 million signatures in under 24 hours and eventually soaring beyond 70 million. It was a modern, brutal expression of a fanbase turning on its star.
Mbappé then missed the Clásico in which Real effectively handed Barcelona the title, still officially unfit and excusing himself from training with the would-be substitutes due to “discomfort”. He reappeared on the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May.
That, too, detonated.
“Fourth-choice striker” and a public rupture
Mbappé did something he rarely does in Madrid: he stopped to talk. After coming on as a substitute, he paused in the mixed zone and fired a shot of his own.
He insisted he was “100 percent” fit and claimed he had not started because Arbeloa had told him he was now the “fourth-choice striker”. For a player of his stature, those words were volcanic. Reports later suggested his anger was rooted as much in the earlier sacking of Xabi Alonso as in any tactical decision.
Arbeloa was forced to respond almost immediately. In his press conference, peppered with Mbappé questions, he pushed back.
“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.”
The Athletic described “growing disappointment” with Mbappé “from the dressing room to the board”. His camp hit back, insisting in a statement that a portion of the criticism was based on an “over-interpretation” of events around a recovery period “strictly supervised by the club”, and that it did not reflect the reality of his commitment or daily work.
By then, the season felt poisoned. Mbappé was still scoring, still drawing defenders, still carrying a threat, but every gesture, every absence, every grimace was being picked apart. For Real Madrid’s marquee signing, the Bernabéu had become a courtroom.
Freedom in blue
Then came the World Cup. A different shirt. A different country. A different Mbappé.
Away from the deafening noise of Madrid, the 27-year-old has looked liberated in North America. He has been ruthless, clinical, almost carefree. Eight goals so far, dragging France towards another shot at glory.
He has produced three braces – against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden – then a winner from the penalty spot against Paraguay and a stunning opener against Morocco in the quarter-finals. The only game he hasn’t scored in, against Norway in the group stage, he compensated with two assists.
His eight-goal haul puts him level with Lionel Messi in a dazzling Golden Boot race. His overall World Cup tally now stands at 20, just one shy of Messi’s 21. The record is within reach – if not in 2026, then in future editions. The numbers hint at where he feels most at ease.
There is a clear contrast. In the dark blue of France, he is not just a star; he is the captain, the undisputed talisman in a squad overflowing with attacking talent. The hierarchy is simple: this is Mbappé’s team.
His team-mates have closed ranks around him after his turbulent club campaign. On the eve of the tournament, Ousmane Dembélé did not hold back.
“The criticism towards him is very, very unfair,” Dembélé said. “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.”
On international duty, he is doing exactly that.
Spain’s complicated gaze
The picture in Spain is more complex than a simple love-hate story. Mbappé’s leadership, ego and off-field decisions are questioned, but even his harshest critics acknowledge his extraordinary attacking contribution and decisiveness. He is a global superstar in a league that scrutinises its biggest names relentlessly, and any discussion of his treatment has to sit alongside Spain’s troubling record in dealing with Black players.
“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 traced a shift in Mbappé’s mindset. At first, under Carlo Ancelotti, the Frenchman arrived with “complete humbleness”, fully aware of the size of the club and doing what he was told. Then came a turning point: two missed penalties, against Liverpool and Athletic Club. He was “feeling really down”, Balague said, and decided, “I am going to do it my own way”.
The goals flowed again, and the numbers under Ancelotti were excellent. But this past season, under Alonso and then Arbeloa, the chemistry simply hasn’t worked.
The question now is whether this is a tactical problem, a personality clash, or a club that has not yet figured out how to build around its most dangerous weapon.
A semi-final with Spain – and a reckoning
For the moment, Mbappé has parked those questions. He stands on the brink of another World Cup final, in the kind of form that terrifies defenders and animates highlight reels. The twist? The semi-final is against Spain – the country he now calls home, the nation whose press dissects his every move.
“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 knows what awaits if France fall short. He knows what awaits when he returns to Madrid, regardless of how many goals he scores in North America.
But right now, in this tournament, he has a chance to do two things at once: knock out the European champions and continue to rewrite the story around his name. If he sends Spain home and carries this form back into the club season, the chorus of critics in the Bernabéu will have to decide whether to keep booing – or start apologising.
