Kylian Mbappé's Struggles at Real Madrid Amid Trophy Drought
Kylian Mbappé has rarely been short of goals in Madrid. What he has lacked is peace.
Since walking out of Paris Saint-Germain and into the glare of the Bernabéu in 2024, the Frenchman has rattled in 86 goals in 103 games. Those are numbers that usually buy adoration and patience in the Spanish capital. Instead, they have been swallowed by a single, damning fact: Real Madrid have not lifted a major trophy since he arrived.
In a city that measures greatness in silver, not statistics, Mbappé has become the lightning rod for a club stuck in a trophy drought. Every off night, every misstep, every grim defeat has been laid at the feet of the man brought in to be the difference.
A season that turned sour
The tension built slowly, then snapped.
At first, the narrative was simple enough: Mbappé needed time. Time to adapt to a new league, a new dressing room, a new hierarchy. The scrutiny sharpened with every bad result, every early exit from a cup competition, but the goals kept coming. When he surged past 40 for the season, the numbers suggested a star doing his job.
The table said something else.
By the end of the 2025-26 campaign, Real Madrid had been left trailing by Barcelona in the title race and dumped out of the Champions League quarter-finals by Bayern Munich. The club’s season disintegrated just as Mbappé’s form tailed off. After a blistering first half of the campaign, niggling injuries slowed him, his sharpness blunted. From mid-February to the final whistle in May, he found the net only four times.
The pressure around him hardened into something more toxic. The criticism stopped being about form and started to sound like a verdict on character.
Flashpoint at Valdebebas
The mood inside the club mirrored the noise outside.
According to The Athletic, tempers boiled over before a league meeting with Real Betis in late April. During a training game at Valdebebas, a member of the coaching staff flagged Mbappé offside. The forward responded with a volley of abuse. It was a small moment on a practice pitch, but it captured the wider atmosphere: frayed, edgy, combustible.
Then came the injury.
Mbappé suffered a hamstring problem in the match against Betis. Instead of remaining at the training ground to work through his recovery, he took advantage of some time off and flew to Sardinia with his girlfriend, Spanish actor Ester Expósito. Photographs of the pair on a yacht surfaced while Real Madrid were playing Espanyol in La Liga.
The optics were disastrous. Internally, there was irritation. Outside, outrage. In a season already defined by underachievement, the image of the club’s marquee signing sunning himself while his teammates toiled became a symbol.
Alvaro Arbeloa publicly defended his player, but the backlash had already found its outlet. An “Mbappe out” petition spread online at extraordinary speed, collecting around 12 million signatures in less than a day and eventually surpassing 70 million. It was a digital howl of frustration, directed squarely at the club’s biggest star.
From hamstring strain to public rift
The closing weeks of the season only deepened the rift.
Mbappé missed the Clasico in which Real effectively handed Barcelona the title, still deemed unfit and excusing himself from training with the prospective substitutes because of “discomfort”. He returned to the squad against Real Oviedo in mid-May, but only on the bench.
That was the moment he decided to speak.
Unusually for him in Madrid colours, Mbappé stopped in the mixed zone after coming on as a substitute. He told reporters he was “100 percent” fit and claimed he had been left out because Arbeloa informed him he was now the “fourth-choice striker”. The comments detonated instantly.
Arbeloa, peppered with questions, pushed back in his press conference. “He must have misunderstood me, at no point did I say he was the fourth-choice striker,” the coach 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, patience was thinning. The Athletic reported “growing disappointment” with Mbappé “from the dressing room to the board”. His camp responded with a statement of their own, 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 season ended with Madrid empty-handed and Mbappé cast as both central figure and convenient scapegoat.
France, and a different kind of noise
The World Cup has given him something else: distance.
In North America, far from the echo chamber of Spanish talk shows and front pages, Mbappé has gone back to the simplest version of himself. He has scored. And scored. And scored again.
Eight goals so far, dragging France towards another shot at the trophy. He has hit 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. Even in the only game he failed to score, against Norway in the group phase, he still produced two assists.
Those eight goals have pulled him level with Lionel Messi at the top of the Golden Boot race. They have also taken his overall World Cup tally to 20, just one behind Messi’s 21. The all-time record is suddenly within reach, whether in 2026 or at future tournaments.
In blue, he looks unburdened. In blue, he looks at home.
Didier Deschamps has attacking riches everywhere, yet there is no debate over who leads this team. Mbappé is France’s captain, their undisputed talisman. The dynamic around him is very different to Madrid. He is not the outsider superstar dropped into a restless institution; he is the centrepiece of a group that has grown up with him.
His team-mates have not been shy in defending him. On the eve of the tournament, Ousmane Dembélé called the criticism “very, very unfair”.
“Some people go a bit too far with the criticism of Kylian,” Dembélé said. “He’s an incredible player and a very good person off the pitch. Some people overdo the criticism because he’s Kylian Mbappe. 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 Mbappe, 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 this evidence, he is doing exactly that.
Spain’s complicated view
The picture in Spain is more tangled than a simple love-hate divide.
Mbappé’s leadership, ego and off-pitch choices are questioned. His goals, his explosiveness, his decisiveness are impossible to ignore. The debate around him has become a referendum on what Real Madrid expect from their superstars.
There is another layer too. As a black player in a country with an uneasy recent record on racism in football, Mbappé operates under a harsher spotlight than many of his peers.
“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 Mbappe. 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 Mbappe, or because he is not adapting quick enough? 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 crux of it. In Madrid, everything is measured against winning. Style, numbers, even history bend to that single demand.
Facing Spain, carrying France
Now Mbappé walks into a World Cup semi-final against the country where he lives and works, but not yet fully belongs.
He arrives in devastating form, sharing the Golden Boot lead, on the brink of a World Cup scoring record. He also arrives hardened by a season in which every gesture has been dissected.
“There is only one scenario where you can relax and that is winning the World Cup,” he said before the showdown with Spain. “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.”
Those words could just as easily apply to his life at Real Madrid. There too, only one scenario brings calm: winning.
If he sends Spain, the European champions, out of their own World Cup dream and then carries this form back into the club season, the conversation around him in Madrid will have to change. The question is not whether his critics will owe him an apology.
It is whether they will be ready to give it.
