Kylian Mbappé: Prolific Scorer Amidst Criticism

Kylian Mbappé has rarely been more lethal. He has rarely been more loathed.

From the moment he walked out of Paris and into the glare of the Bernabéu in 2024, the relationship between Mbappé and Spain’s media has felt like a cold war waiting for a spark. Two years on, the numbers are extraordinary: 86 goals in 103 games for Real Madrid. For almost any other forward in the club’s history, that would be the basis of a legend.

For Mbappé, it has become Exhibit A in an argument that refuses to go away: how can a player so prolific be at the heart of a team that has not lifted a single major trophy since he arrived?

Goals without glory

Madrid’s failure to win La Liga, the Champions League or a major cup during Mbappé’s time has twisted the narrative. His name sits on every billboard, every shirt, every TV graphic. It also sits in the first line of every post-mortem.

He crossed the 40-goal mark last season, yet his campaign is filed under “disappointment”. Real Madrid fell away badly in the title race, watching Barcelona pull clear. Bayern Munich then dumped them out of the Champions League in the quarter-finals. The bigger the collapse, the more those 40 goals looked like decoration rather than domination.

His form told its own story. After a blistering first half of the season, Mbappé faded. From mid-February to the end of the campaign he scored just four times, his rhythm disrupted by a series of niggling injuries. For a player whose every touch is judged, that dip felt like a full-blown crisis.

And in Madrid, crises rarely stay on the pitch.

Training ground flashpoint and Sardinia storm

The tension finally boiled over in late April. As Real’s season unravelled, the atmosphere around Valdebebas turned sour. According to The Athletic, Mbappé became embroiled in an ugly confrontation with a member of the coaching staff before a game against Real Betis, launching a volley of abuse at a coach who had flagged him offside during a training match. It was a flash of temper, but also a symptom of a club on edge.

Then came the hamstring injury against Betis. Instead of remaining at the training ground to work on his recovery, Mbappé took advantage of time off to fly to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photos of the couple on a yacht surfaced at the same time Madrid were grinding through a league match against Espanyol.

The images did not go down well. Inside the club, questions were asked. Outside, outrage grew. Coach Álvaro Arbeloa publicly backed his star forward, but the mood had already turned. An “Mbappé out” online petition went viral, hitting around 12 million signatures in less than a day and eventually soaring past 70 million. It was raw, emotional and, in its own way, a measure of how polarising he had become.

Mbappé then missed the Clásico in which Real effectively handed Barcelona the title. Officially, he was still not fully fit and excused himself from training with the substitutes due to “discomfort”. He returned to the bench against Real Oviedo in mid-May, and that is where the story took another twist.

“Fourth-choice striker” and open rebellion

Mbappé almost never stops in the mixed zone. This time, he did. After coming on as a substitute against Oviedo, he walked through the media area and dropped a grenade.

He declared himself “100 percent” fit and claimed he had not started because Arbeloa told him he had been demoted to “fourth-choice striker”. The comments landed with a thud. They painted a picture of a superstar humiliated, and a coach who had chosen to put him in his place.

Arbeloa pushed back hard in his next 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 carefully worded statement, arguing that “a portion of the criticism is based on an over-interpretation of elements related to a recovery period strictly supervised by the club, and does not reflect the reality of Kylian's commitment and daily work for the team.”

The damage, though, was done. The second half of Madrid’s season had become a soap opera, and Mbappé was written into every storyline.

France: the refuge

Then came the World Cup. A different continent. A different shirt. A different Mbappé?

In North America, away from the deafening echo chamber of Madrid, the 27-year-old has looked liberated. He has ripped through defences with a familiar swagger, scoring eight times as France surge towards another shot at the trophy.

He has collected a trio of braces against Senegal, Iraq and Sweden. He has buried a winner from the penalty spot against Paraguay. He has lashed in a stunning opener against Morocco in the quarter-finals. Even on the one night he failed to score, against Norway in the group stage, he still produced two assists.

Those eight goals have dragged him level with Lionel Messi at the top of the Golden Boot race for this tournament. His overall World Cup tally now stands at 20, just one shy of Messi’s all-time record of 21. Whether he catches and passes that mark in 2026 or in a later edition, the trajectory is clear: Mbappé is on the brink of owning one of football’s most sacred records.

And he looks, quite simply, at home. In the dark blue of France, he is captain, talisman and undisputed reference point. Around him, Didier Deschamps has a squad packed with attacking talent, yet there is no debate over who leads. The hierarchy is obvious. The team belongs to Mbappé.

“They shouldn’t keep going after him”

Inside the France camp, there is no appetite to indulge the Spanish storm. Ousmane Dembélé, speaking on the eve of the World Cup, did not hide his irritation.

“The criticism towards him is very, very unfair,” he 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 struck a similar note. “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.”

For France, Mbappé is not a problem to be solved. He is the solution.

Spain’s uneasy gaze

Back in Spain, the picture is more complicated. Mbappé’s leadership, his ego, his behaviour away from the pitch – all sit under the microscope alongside his goals. He is a global superstar, and that status brings a level of scrutiny most players never experience.

The country’s own issues form part of the backdrop. Spain’s record on the treatment of black players has been patchy, and any discussion of a black superstar at Real Madrid cannot be separated entirely from that context.

“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 recalled a different version of Mbappé at the start. “He went through a period when he first arrived of complete humbleness, realising he was at Real Madrid, and he was doing what he was told under Carlo Ancelotti.

“Then after missing two penalties, against Liverpool and Athletic Club, he was feeling really down and thought 'I am going to do it my own way'. The goals started coming, and he was great numbers-wise for Ancelotti. But this season it simply hasn't worked, under Alonso or Arbeloa.”

That is the paradox: a player producing elite numbers in a team that still feels less than the sum of its parts.

A semi-final against home – and against doubt

Now, the World Cup offers Mbappé the stage he craves and the opponent he knows better than any: Spain, the country he calls home during the club season, stands between France and another final.

Mbappé is not naïve about what awaits him if France fall short. “There is only one scenario where you can relax and that is winning the World Cup,” he said before the semi-final. “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 understands the stakes. So do his critics.

This tournament has already gone some way to answering Hernandez’s prediction that Mbappé would “silence” the noise. Eight goals, decisive performances, a France side built around his talent and authority – all of it pushes back against the narrative that he cannot carry a team when it matters most.

Now comes the sharpest test of all. If Mbappé knocks out the European champions and walks into the new club season still in this kind of form, the conversation in Spain will have to change.

And if it does not, the question will no longer be about whether Mbappé owes Madrid more – but whether Madrid, and its critics, owe something to him.