Mbappé: A Superstar Under Fire in Madrid and Unstoppable for France

From a distance, it looks absurd. A forward who has plundered 86 goals in 103 games for Real Madrid should be living in permanent adulation. Instead, Kylian Mbappé walks into every match at the Bernabéu knowing that anything less than brilliance will be torn apart in the morning papers.

The numbers say “superstar”. The trophy cabinet says “failure”. And in Madrid, that second column matters more.

A Galáctico Without the Glory

Mbappé’s 2024 free transfer from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid was supposed to reset an era. The club got its poster boy, the player many saw as heir to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet since his arrival, Madrid have failed to win a major trophy. That drought has turned the Frenchman from saviour-in-waiting into a lightning rod.

Every poor result, every early cup exit, has sharpened the knives. His slow integration was the first theme. Then the rhetoric hardened. By the end of the 2025-26 season, as Real slid away from Barcelona in the title race and fell to Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-finals, the tone around Mbappé had become openly toxic.

He still broke the 40-goal barrier across the campaign. It didn’t matter. In a season framed as a fiasco, individual brilliance became a footnote.

The second half of that season hurt him. After a blistering opening, the goals dried up. Between mid-February and the final whistle of the campaign, he scored just four times, hampered by niggling injuries and a body that no longer moved with the same explosive inevitability. The timing could not have been worse.

Training-Ground Flashpoint and a Sardinian Storm

The pressure finally boiled over in the spring. Real’s season was unravelling; the atmosphere around the club turned sour, and Mbappé found himself right in the middle of it.

According to The Athletic, the 27-year-old clashed angrily with a member of the backroom staff before a league match against Real Betis in late April. In a training game, a coach flagged him offside. Mbappé responded with a volley of abuse. It was a small incident on the face of it, but a perfect snapshot of a dressing room on edge and a superstar fraying under the strain.

Then came the hamstring injury against Betis. Instead of remaining at Valdebebas to work on his recovery, Mbappé took advantage of some time off to fly to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photographs of the forward on a yacht surfaced while Real Madrid were playing Espanyol in La Liga.

The images detonated. Inside the club, and across Spain, the decision drew heavy criticism. The optics were dreadful: the team labouring at home, the marquee signing pictured basking in the Mediterranean sun.

Coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly defended his striker, but the mood had turned. An “Mbappé out” online petition went viral, collecting around 12 million signatures in under 24 hours and eventually topping 70 million. It was the digital embodiment of a fanbase that had lost patience.

He then missed the Clásico that effectively handed Barcelona the title, still considered unfit. Mbappé excused himself from a training session with the would-be substitutes, citing “discomfort”. When he finally returned to the squad, it was only to the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May.

That, Mbappé felt, crossed a line.

“Fourth-Choice Striker” and a War of Words

Mbappé did something he rarely does in Madrid: he stopped in the mixed zone and spoke his mind. After coming on as a substitute against Oviedo, he told reporters he was “100 percent” fit and claimed Arbeloa had informed him he was now “fourth-choice striker”.

It was a pointed, public challenge to the club’s narrative.

The fallout was immediate. Arbeloa, peppered with questions in his press conference, denied the accusation.

“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 Athletic reported “growing disappointment” with Mbappé “from the dressing room to the board”. His camp pushed back, releasing a statement arguing that much of the criticism stemmed from an over-interpretation of details related to a recovery period “strictly supervised by the club” and insisting it did not reflect his commitment or daily work.

The relationship between star and city felt broken. The sacking of Xabi Alonso, reported as a key source of Mbappé’s frustration, only deepened the sense of disconnect.

For a player used to being adored, Spain had become a minefield.

Escape to North America

Then came the World Cup. New continent, new rhythm, same player—yet a very different mood.

In North America, Mbappé has looked liberated. The noise of Madrid is thousands of miles away, and in the dark blue of France he has reverted to type: ruthless, decisive, unstoppable.

Eight goals so far. A trio of braces against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden. A coolly taken winner from the spot against Paraguay. A stunning opener in the quarter-final against Morocco. Even in the one match he failed to score, against Norway in the group stage, he still produced two assists.

His haul has dragged him level with Lionel Messi at the top of a dazzling Golden Boot race. Across World Cups, he now sits on 20 goals, just one behind Messi’s 21. The record is within reach—if not in 2026, then in future editions. Mbappé is on the brink of owning the tournament’s history books.

With France, there is no debate about hierarchy. Despite the array of attacking talent Didier Deschamps can call on, Mbappé is the undisputed talisman and captain, the man the rest of the squad orbit around.

His team-mates have made that clear.

“They Overdo the Criticism Because He’s Kylian Mbappé”

On the eve of the tournament, Ousmane Dembélé stepped forward to defend his friend.

“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.”

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. Each goal in this World Cup feels like a rebuttal to a season’s worth of Spanish column inches.

Spain’s Complicated View

The picture in Spain, though, is not entirely one-note. Admiration and exasperation sit side by side.

Questions linger over his leadership style, his ego, his behaviour away from the pitch. They coexist with recognition of his extraordinary attacking output and his ability to decide matches on his own. The scrutiny is amplified by his status as a global superstar—and by Spain’s own uneasy record in the treatment of black players, a context that cannot be ignored.

“In Spain, we are famous for making stories out of the little that we see of players,” 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 the start of Mbappé’s Madrid career, when the forward arrived with “complete humbleness”, doing exactly what Carlo Ancelotti asked of him. Then came a turning point: two missed penalties against Liverpool and Athletic Club. His confidence dipped, his approach changed.

“He was feeling really down and thought ‘I am going to do it my own way’,” Balagué said. The goals flowed again under Ancelotti, the numbers looked spectacular, but this season under Alonso and then Arbeloa, “it simply hasn’t worked”.

A Semi-Final Against Home

Now comes a twist only football can script. Mbappé, born in France but shaped by Spanish scrutiny, faces Spain in a World Cup semi-final. The country that has questioned him, doubted him, dissected his every move, now stands between him and another final.

He knows what is at stake—on the pitch and in the narrative.

“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 is not running from the pressure. He is inviting it.

Mbappé came into this World Cup with a season’s worth of baggage from Madrid on his shoulders. Eight goals later, he has lightened the load. Not erased it—only trophies in white will do that—but shifted the conversation.

If he knocks out the European champions and then carries this ferocious form back into the club season, the question in Spain will not be whether he deserves the criticism.

It will be who dares to keep piling it on.