Kylian Mbappé’s latest move has exhausted the patience of Real Madrid fans. A large part of the supporters (whose feelings they expressed on social media) did not like his getaway to Cagliari (Italy). Despite being injured and doubtful for Sunday’s Clásico, the season has once again been disappointing and without titles, and the forward landed in Madrid, according to images from El Chiringuito, only 12 minutes before the start of the match against Espanyol (0-2). His vacation was interpreted as a lack of commitment.
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The press that has less interference with the executive leadership has stopped protecting him, and this week some embarrassments have been published from different media: there are cracks in the locker room and discomfort in the board. The phrase “they are tired of Mbappé” has been heard in circles for some time, although it had not surfaced so loudly in the public space as now. The dream signing for three summers by Florentino Pérez lives with a high detachment from all levels of the white pyramid. “I think everyone knows what they represent and where they are,” said Álvaro Arbeloa, who insisted on reconnecting the word leader with Vinícius, who scored two goals against Espanyol.
Diving into Mbappé’s personality is not like looking into crystal-clear waters. In the Frenchman’s career, there are two common points that always appear in his clubs: the goals he scores and the lack of affection when he leaves. To understand the character, you have to build his story chapter by chapter, from when he was a child in that 60-square-meter apartment in the Bondy neighborhood, on the outskirts of Paris.
“Mbappé has been building a very big ego,” explain sources who know his story well and have documented it biographically. That thin-legged boy used to go through all the locker rooms of his club, where his father was his coach, and put his hand on his chest pretending to sing La Marseillaise and play a World Cup with France. That was his great dream. Fulfilled at 18 years old. He always competed in higher categories, stood out, and at 11 years old he was on the radar of Clairefontaine, the high-performance center that controls the French national team. And the boy started visiting clubs with his parents looking for the best option in every way.
Journalist Enrique Ortego detailed it in 2023. At 14 years old, Mbappé had already visited several clubs in France and Chelsea, and also arrived at Valdebebas. The stay was more of a courtesy thanks to Zinedine Zidane’s insistence, who always pushed for his signing, but at that time his mother’s clear ideas caught attention, explaining that if they moved to live in Madrid, the club should cover the costs of a house in La Moraleja and that the boy would study at the French Lycée. Mbappé also fantasized about wearing white. But it was not the time. Six months later he signed for Monaco.
“There he had problems with a youth coach,” emphasize biographical sources. At 14 years old, Mbappé was already playing in that category and his father Wilfried, who took care more of the football side, was on top of him. The footballer, endowed with stratospheric qualities but at the same time aware of it, blossomed in 2016 in Ligue 1 and was Monaco’s true scorer with 28 goals. In summer 2017, PSG paid 180 million. “I did in almost six months what more than three-quarters of the players in the club’s history have not achieved. People can always criticize me for being only six months, but in six months I had the best season in the club’s history,” Mbappé said at that time, when he was booed by the fans for leaving. “He has ego,” Thierry Henry explained then, although he advocated protecting him because he was a French asset.
Mbappé’s contract was galactic, negotiated by his mother Fayza Lamari, who oversees all aspects of the French star’s football career and sponsorships. In Paris, he won leagues, never the Champions League, shared that ego dance with Neymar and Leo Messi, played 308 matches with 256 goals and 110 assists, and one moment defines his personality. In 2024, with Luis Enrique as coach and already knowing it was his last season, the coach substituted him at halftime against Monaco. The forward did not watch the rest of the match from the bench. He went to sign autographs and then to the box with his mother in a playful attitude, far from the competitiveness or involvement of the moment. “Now we are more of a team,” said the Asturian without the French star, who popularized a video in his documentary trying to convince Mbappé that, like Michael Jordan, stars must defend.
And Mbappé signed for Madrid and sued PSG, leaving again through the back door. He won the lawsuit and another 50 million. European champions the French; no one misses the Gallic in the Parc des Princes.
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The Mbappé clan was mainly formed by three people when he landed in Madrid: Fayza Lamari, Delphine Verheyden, and Ziad Hammoud. His mother is the negotiator (“she is relentless, always wants more,” they say at Real Madrid), the second is a lawyer who manages his commercial strategy (few brands, but millionaire contracts), and the third is the one who signs the contracts. French swimmer Léon Marchand, a friend of Mbappé, explained in L’Èquipe after the Paris Games how he tries to imitate his marketing strategy: “They stay in their little cocoon, they haven’t hired many people, nor have they resorted to an agency to sell them sponsors.” All of them settled in the La Finca urbanization, which was Gareth Bale’s house.
“They stay in their little cocoon, they haven’t hired many people”
Léon Marchand
For L’Èquipe, in 2024
Mbappé’s arrival coincided with a Real Madrid satiated by the last Champions League, but with serious structural problems in Ancelotti’s team, who had lost Toni Kroos. From Valdebebas it is pointed out that “at the beginning they expected something else from him, another type of leadership, for example, he did not take penalties.”
In the 2024 Eurocup with France, in the midst of elections in which Marine Le Pen’s far right was emerging as a government alternative, the French captain did raise his voice to criticize that type of politics in France. He did not hide in the mixed zone, leading causes like the racist insult from Prestriani to Vinícius, so it was expected that his aura would infect the squad. “He goes very much his own way,” they define. “The club had to give him a warning,” they add.
The arrival of Xabi Alonso rescued his best version. The coach from Tolosa understood that he and Vinícius did not quite mix well in the Madrid he imagined, so the Brazilian was the one who started to get fewer minutes. A shot in the foot for Alonso, who started a war he lost. He stopped being himself. One of the aspects that emerged after his departure, according to sources close to his coaching staff, is that Mbappé was given all the leadership, but he was not able to make Alonso’s cause his own, so players like Bellingham, Vinícius, or Valverde ended up motivating the change on the bench due to lack of chemistry.
“Mbappé is a professional. He takes care of his body and cares about the rivals,” explain the same biographical sources. “But he has a lot of ego, he goes more his own way,” they add.
The penultimate farce is his knee injury, in which he exposed Real Madrid’s medical services. It is interpreted that the publication in L’Èquipe revealing they made a mistake on the leg (a claim denied by Valdebebas) comes from him or the French national team itself. Mbappé had to deny that it was true days later.
The Frenchman does not hold back, in his second blank year in Madrid, in publishing his getaways on his days off or during injury periods, like now in Cagliari with his girlfriend Esther Expósito. And he feeds that well-founded feeling that he lives in another reality, that of his “little cocoon,” where everything revolves around his figure. They know it well (less so) in Monaco and Paris. And now they are starting to question everything in Madrid, after three coaches and two years without titles. Mbappé is neither Real Madrid’s big problem nor the great solution.
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