Mbappé: Vilified in Madrid, Untouchable in Blue

From a distance, it looks absurd. A forward who has rattled in 86 goals in 103 games for Real Madrid, yet walks into Valdebebas each morning under a cloud. Kylian Mbappé swapped Paris for the Bernabéu in 2024 on a free transfer that felt like a heist. Two years on, the relationship with Spain — and with its media — is fraying badly.

The numbers say one thing. The mood says something else entirely.

Madrid have not lifted a major trophy since Mbappé arrived. That failure has swallowed his statistics whole. In a club that measures itself in silver, not xG, the Frenchman has become the lightning rod for a broader collapse. Every draw, every defeat, every early exit? His name is dragged to the front of the charge sheet.

He no longer has the luxury of anonymity. A quiet game is not just a dip in form, it is an invitation for a public flogging.

From dream start to toxic spring

At first, the scrutiny centred on his adaptation. New league, new teammates, new expectations. Then the tone hardened. Each setback sharpened the knives, and by the end of the 2025-26 season, the atmosphere around Real Madrid had turned poisonous.

Barcelona pulled away in the title race. Bayern Munich bundled them out of the Champions League in the quarter-finals. Mbappé still finished the campaign beyond the 40-goal mark, but his season felt strangely hollow. His feats, so often headline material, were reduced to footnotes in the story of a failing team.

The timing of his drop-off did not help. After a blistering first half of the season, niggling injuries and fatigue bit hard. From mid-February to the final whistle of the campaign, he scored just four times. For most strikers, that is a blip. For Mbappé, in this context, it became an indictment.

The pressure finally boiled over.

Flashpoint at Valdebebas

Late April, in the run-in, Real Madrid’s season was unravelling on the pitch and cracking off it. According to The Athletic, Mbappé clashed angrily with a member of the backroom staff before a match against Real Betis. In a training game, a coach flagged him offside. The forward’s response was a volley of abuse.

It was a small moment, but it told a bigger story. Tempers were short. Trust was frayed. The club felt on edge.

Against Betis, Mbappé then suffered a hamstring injury. Instead of remaining at Valdebebas to work on his recovery, he used his time off to fly to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photographs of the pair on a yacht surfaced as Madrid were playing Espanyol in La Liga.

For a fanbase already on edge, the images landed like a slap.

Inside the club, the decision drew criticism. Outside, it ignited fury. Coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly defended his star, but the anger found another outlet: an “Mbappé out” petition online that went viral at dizzying speed. Within 24 hours it had amassed around 12 million signatures, and it eventually surged past 70 million.

The fracture between player and public was now impossible to ignore.

Benched, then blasting back

The tension followed him back onto the team sheet. Mbappé missed the Clásico in which Real effectively handed the title to Barcelona, still deemed unfit and excusing himself from training with the likely substitutes due to “discomfort”. When he finally returned, it was only to the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May.

This time, he refused to stay silent.

After coming on as a substitute, Mbappé did something he rarely does in Madrid: he stopped in the mixed zone and spoke his mind. He declared himself “100 percent” fit and claimed he had not started because Arbeloa had told him he was now the “fourth-choice striker”.

The line detonated across Spain.

Arbeloa, bombarded with questions, hit back in his press conference. “He must have misunderstood me, at no point did I say he was the fourth-choice striker,” he insisted. “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 “from the dressing room to the board”. His camp responded with a statement, arguing that much of the criticism stemmed from an over-interpretation of events during a recovery period “strictly supervised by the club” and did not reflect his commitment or daily work.

The season ended with Madrid empty-handed and Mbappé cast as both culprit and symbol. The sacking of Xabi Alonso, a coach he was known to respect, only deepened his frustration.

He needed an escape. The World Cup arrived right on time.

A different Kylian in deep blue

North America has seen a very different version of Mbappé. Away from the white noise of Madrid, he has reverted to something simpler: goals, games, glory.

Eight goals so far. A tournament lit up by his finishing and his relentlessness. He has rattled in three separate braces — against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden — then added a penalty winner against Paraguay and a spectacular opener against Morocco in the quarter-finals. The only game in which he did not score, against Norway in the group stage, he still produced two assists.

He is level with Lionel Messi at the top of a ferocious Golden Boot race on eight goals. His overall World Cup tally now stands at 20, just one behind Messi’s 21. The all-time record is no longer a distant dream; it is a target he could hit in 2026 or in future editions.

In the dark blue of France, he looks lighter. Freer. This is his kingdom.

Didier Deschamps has an embarrassment of attacking riches, but there is no debate over who leads this team. Mbappé is captain, talisman, reference point. The dressing room follows him.

His teammates have closed ranks around him after his bruising club season. Ousmane Dembélé called the criticism of Mbappé “very, very unfair” on the eve of the tournament, accusing some of “going a bit too far” simply because of who he is. He painted a picture of a player hounded for the smallest gestures — how he ties his laces, how he pulls up his socks — and reminded everyone that “he’s still a human being”.

Lucas Hernandez struck a similar note. “Kylian is an extraordinary player,” he said. “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 uneasy gaze

Inside Spain, the view of Mbappé is not entirely black and white. His leadership, his ego, his off-pitch choices are all questioned, but they sit alongside an acceptance of his extraordinary output and big-game decisiveness. He is a global superstar in a league that devours them, and scrutiny follows him more intensely than most.

There is another layer too: Spain’s uncomfortable record in dealing with Black players. That context cannot be separated from how some criticism is framed or amplified.

“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. He described a fanbase still unsure about Mbappé. Too cold. Too distant. Not yet theirs.

Balague recalled Raul explaining what Madrid supporters really adore: players chasing hopeless balls, running themselves into the ground. Effort they can see, sweat they can feel. If Real were winning, Balague argued, the story would be very different.

The central question hangs over the whole project: are Madrid failing because coaches have not unlocked Mbappé properly, or because he has not adapted quickly enough?

When he first arrived, under Carlo Ancelotti, he cut a humble figure, fully aware of the badge on his chest and obedient to the structure around him. Then came the double penalty miss — against Liverpool and Athletic Club — and a crisis of confidence. His response was to take more control, to “do it my own way”. The goals flowed again, and his numbers under Ancelotti looked formidable.

This season, under Alonso and then Arbeloa, that balance has vanished. The chemistry has not clicked. The narrative has turned.

A semi-final with layers

Now comes Spain again, but in a different shirt and on a different stage. A World Cup semi-final against the country where he lives, plays and divides opinion.

Mbappé stands at the centre of it all: in electric form, level at the top of the scoring charts, and still braced for the next wave of judgment.

“There is only one scenario where you can relax and that is winning the World Cup,” he said before the showdown with La Roja. When you play for France, he added, anything short of victory brings heavy criticism. This group, he insisted, is tightly knit and driving toward one thing: winning.

They are in the last four, but he knows the road is long and the hardest games are still to come.

Hernandez predicted before the tournament that Mbappé would silence his critics. So far, each ruthless finish, each decisive run, has turned down the volume a notch.

Now the equation is brutally simple. If he knocks out the European champions in the semi-final and carries this form back into the club season, the same voices that hounded him in Spain will have to look in the mirror and ask themselves whether they misread the man who was supposed to be their new king.