Kylian Mbappé is … back? Right? Kinda? Maybe? Sorta?
The first couple months of Mbappé at Real Madrid went about as poorly as anyone could’ve reasonably expected. He racked up a record eight offsides in Madrid’s 4-0 home defeat against Barcelona in late October. And then, a month later, there was his one shot attempted — a penalty, which he missed — in an uncompetitive 2-0 loss to Liverpool at Anfield.
Sure, he had scored 10 goals in his first 21 Champions League and LaLiga matches with his new club, but take away the penalties and Mbappé had just seven goals by Christmas. When arguably the best player in the world joins the supposed best team in the world, a non-penalty goal every three games is pretty much the worst-case scenario.
Except, since coming back from the holiday break, Mbappé started to look a little more like we all expected. It only took him nine matches after Christmas to score seven more non-penalty goals. But then, of course, he went scoreless over his past two, including last weekend’s shock 1-0 loss to Espanyol.
Plus, he hasn’t exactly been beating up on elite competition over the past month-plus. Outside of a goal in Madrid’s 5-2 loss to Barcelona in the Spanish Super Cup, everything else came against either FC Salzburg, who posted the worst goal differential of any team in the Champions League’s brand-new league phase, or bottom-half-of-the-table teams in Spain.
So, ahead of this weekend’s top-of-the-table clash between Real Madrid and intra-city rivals Atlético Madrid — stream live on ESPN+, Saturday, 3 p.m. ET — Alex Kirkland and Ryan O’Hanlon team up to figure out why Mbappé struggled so much over the first half of the season, what has driven his recent improvement, and whether we should expect to see the Mbappé of old for the rest of the season.
Coming into this season, here’s where Mbappé ranked across a number of key statistics among every player in Europe’s Big Five top leagues since 2017-18:
• 155 non-penalty goals, 2nd
• 130.9 non-penalty expected goals, 2nd
• 53.5 expected goals assisted, 3rd
• 985 progressive carries, 2nd
• 2,413 progressive passes received, 2nd
• 1,645 touches inside the penalty area, 2nd
Only Robert Lewandowski scored more goals and generated more expected goals. Only Lionel Messi and Mohamed Salah created more expected goals assisted. Only Messi completed more progressive carries, and only Salah received more progressive passes and took more touches inside the opposition box.
The only player to rank within the top 10 — let alone top three — for all of those categories was Mbappé. And the only players to outpace him in any of those areas are the greatest soccer player to ever live, the greatest goal scorer the Bundesliga has ever seen, and the best winger in the history of the Premier League. Not bad.
Oh, and did I mention that Mbappé did all of that before his 26th birthday? Messi, Lewandowski and Salah put up those jaw-dropping numbers entirely while they were seasoned professionals. Mbappé did it, mostly, before even hitting his prime. In other words, Mbappé put together one of the greatest seven-year stretches of high-level soccer that you’ll ever see, and he did it before most players actually perform at their best: between the ages of 24 and 30.
And yes, I hear some of you out there, chanting: farmer’s league, farmer’s league, farmer’s league! And fine, PSG’s resource-advantage over the rest of Ligue 1 means that lots of professional soccer players would probably look like statistical superstars if they got to play for that team.
But how about the Champions League? You know, the one where you’re mostly playing against the best teams in the world? Here’s how Mbappé ranks by those same numbers over the same stretch mentioned above:
• 36 non-penalty goals, tied for 2nd
• 36.5 non-penalty xG, 2nd
• 24.0 xG assisted, 1st
• 345 progressive carries, 1st
• 633 progressive passes received, 2nd
• 192 touches inside the penalty area, 1st
In terms of driving the ball upfield with his feet and making runs off the ball, there was no one better than Mbappé. And in terms of then taking those skills and turning them into shots for himself and his teammates, there was also no one better.
At the end of last season, you couldn’t even really make much of an argument that there was another attacker in the world who you’d rather have than Mbappé. Maybe Erling Haaland scored more goals, but you didn’t get the same levels of ball-carrying, chance-creation, and constant penalty-area pressure.
Some Madrid fans might’ve said Vinícius Júnior, but he has only played 80% of the minutes in a season one time in his career. Any others — Lewandowski, Harry Kane, Salah, Lamine Yamal — were either too old or too young.
Coming into the 2024-25 campaign, there had yet to be a single season when Mbappé didn’t deliver world-class production. — O’Hanlon
“I hit rock bottom.” It’s rare to hear a footballer speak so candidly and be willing to sound so vulnerable, let alone a superstar like Mbappé.
Speaking in late December, the France star was reflecting on Madrid’s 2-1 defeat at Athletic Club two weeks earlier. He had seen a crucial penalty saved that night by Athletic Club goalkeeper Julen Agirrezabala. It was his second failed spot-kick in a week, after being denied by Liverpool’s Caoimhín Kelleher seven days earlier.
In between those misses, there was something even more shocking: Mbappé hadn’t even dared to take a penalty against Getafe at the Santiago Bernabéu, telling Jude Bellingham to step up instead. Coach Carlo Ancelotti called that decision “a great act of altruism” — that’s one way of looking at it. But is altruism really a quality you want to see in your elite centre-forward?
Madrid fans are used to their stars displaying supreme self-belief: remember Cristiano Ronaldo? Now, Mbappé appeared to be suffering a crisis of faith. He’d already been struggling earlier in the season, overthinking his every move despite being known for his effortless cool, looking clumsy and awkward. Now, even the penalties weren’t going in.
The reaction from the Spanish media was as understated as you’d expect. “What a disaster!” screamed the front page of Barcelona-based Sport. Even Madrid-supporting Marca’s headline was, “Still not good enough.” The lead play-by-play commentator on Cadena SER, Spain’s most listened-to radio station, said, live on air, “Real Madrid have a problem,” moments after Mbappé’s miss in Bilbao. “Mbappé took the penalty worse than my 8-year-old son would. He was scared s—less.”
And what about Mbappé’s unwillingness to even take a spot kick against Getafe? Josep Pedrerol, host of late-night TV shout-fest El Chiringuito, was clutching at straws. “Mbappé isn’t a coward for refusing to take a penalty,” Pedrerol said. “He’s brave for accepting his insecurity.”
Again, insecurity is not a word you’d expect to hear being used to describe a player you’ve signed as a readymade, bona fide galáctico. Real Madrid paid a €150m signing fee, and locked him in for €15m per year after taxes with the expectation that he would be a superstar.
But the low points continued as Mbappé’s debut season dragged on: in both of Madrid’s frustrating early-season draws against Real Mallorca and Las Palmas, Mbappé failed to score from a total of 13 shots across the two games. And of course, there was the embarrassment of being beaten 4-0 by Barcelona, at home, in Mbappé’s first Clásico appearance.
But as Mbappé tells it, it was the miss against Athletic that was both a nadir, and a catalyst. “The game in Bilbao was good for me,” he said on Dec. 22, after he’d started to steadily put his form back together with four goals in four games. “I hit rock bottom. I missed a penalty. It was time to realize that I have to play with more personality.” — Kirkland
For Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti, it took Mbappé until mid-December to find his feet.
“Mbappé’s period of adaptation has finished,” Ancelotti said on Dec. 21. “He’s now at his best. He’s played well in recent games. He looks more motivated, excited. He needed time, like everybody does. But that period is over.”
The coach was speaking days after Mbappé had won his second trophy with Madrid, scoring with a straightforward finish — OK, a tap-in — in their 3-0 Intercontinental Cup final win over Pachuca, and 24 hours before Mbappé scored his best goal of the season until then, a ferocious hit from distance against Sevilla.
By that point, Ancelotti had tried everything to spark Mbappé’s season into life.
Having started the season as a centre-forward — with Vinicius Jr. and Rodrygo on either wing, and Bellingham behind him, in an attack-minded line-up — Mbappé was trialled out on the left at Leganés on Nov. 24, with Vinícius switching inside. A week later, Mbappé was on the left again against Getafe at the Bernabéu, with Rodrygo in the middle. In both games, he scored, both finishes coming from positions which might otherwise have been occupied by Vinicius.
But this proved a short-term fix, one that seemed designed to help Mbappé feel comfortable and confident, rather than a long-term solution. For the first game in which Mbappé truly looked like his old self, against Atalanta on Dec. 10 — he scored in a thrilling half-hour cameo, before going off with a muscle strain — he was back in the middle. And that’s where Mbappé has stayed, for all of his best performances since: in the Supercopa final, where he was Madrid’s one saving grace, and against Las Palmas, FC Salzburg and Real Valladolid.
Ancelotti’s description of Mbappé during a news conference last month as “the best centre-forward in the world” — rather than, as a journalist had suggested, best player — felt like him making a point.
“People doubted if he could play there,” Ancelotti said. “But he’s a great forward who feels comfortable in the middle. His movement is unique, and playing on the inside, he can make the most of it.”
Ancelotti has identified that off-the-ball movement as Mbappé’s greatest strength: “I don’t ask him to be involved in the build-up play. His best characteristic is finding space and getting into the box. That’s what he needs to do more frequently… And after that, you need somebody who can give you the ball when you’re free.”
Of course, there will always be doubters, including one of the most famous Galácticos to play in Madrid. “[Mbappé] doesn’t know how to play as a [centre] forward in my opinion,” Cristiano Ronaldo said this week. “It isn’t his position.”
Ancelotti’s acknowledgement that a goal scorer is only as good as his service highlights another reason for Mbappé’s uncertain start: the fact that the Madrid team, as a collective, has been unconvincing this season, often more so than their results would suggest. Speaking last month, Mbappé insisted that his problem had been “mental,” not physical or tactical.
“I had to give more,” he said on Jan. 21. “I said to myself ‘Now’s the moment. It’s time to change. You didn’t come to Madrid to play badly’… I was thinking a lot. I was adapting, thinking about how to move, how to find space, whether I should get into Vini’s zone, or Rodrygo’s. When you think so much, you don’t play well… After the game [in Bilbao], I knew I couldn’t do worse, that I could only improve.” — Kirkland
With his recent resurgence, Mbappé’s overall performance for the season doesn’t even look all that bad. For a player who caused a large portion of Spain’s capital city to experience a collective nervous breakdown with his performances against Barcelona and Liverpool, things actually look pretty good.
February has only just started, and Mbappé already has 15 goals and two assists. On a per-90-minute basis, that averages out to the sixth-best rate in LaLiga. If we accept that the first few months were something of a teething process with a new team that didn’t perfectly fit his profile, then might Mbappé just top that list come the end of the season and make us all forget that those first few months and those eight offsides ever even happened?
Well, first off, five of those goals were penalties. But a big part of the reason that Mbappé broke out as a teenager and then never went away is that he always backed up his goals and assists tallies with a large chunk of high-quality shots for himself and chances created for his teammate.
We do sometimes see prospects suddenly put up world-class numbers at a young age, but then they quickly level off because it was all supported by unsustainably hot finishing, a lack of opposition scouting, or some high-quality chance conversion by teammates. Not Mbappé, though — he had the goals and assists, and he had the shots and chances created that make sure that the goals and assists keep coming.
That is, until this season. The player who had the second most expected goals and second most expected goals assisted from 2017 through 2024 currently ranks 25th for combined xG and xG assisted per 90 minutes across Europe’s “Big Five” leagues this season. His current rate of 0.72 per 90 minutes would be a career-low.
Funnily enough, he’s still only second behind Salah for both progressive passes received and touches inside the penalty area this year, and his progressive-carry numbers are pretty much exactly where they were for PSG last season. He’s still doing all the things that have led to lots of great shots and great chances for teammates in the past, but it’s not quite happening as often.
His chance-creation, too, is right around where it was with PSG last season. The bigger issue there, ironically, is that his teammates have let him down. He’s created 3.8 xG assisted, but it’s only been turned into two goals:
Rather, the larger issue is that he’s just not getting as many good shots. He’s still taking as many shots as he normally does — 4.32 per 90 this season, compared to an average of 4.33 at PSG — but they’ve been worth an average of 0.12 xG, compared to 0.17 xG at PSG.
Now, 0.12 is right around the Europe-wide average — in other words, the average shot you see in a given match has a 12% chance of going into the goal — and when you combine that with a high volume of shots, you’re still going to score a high number of goals. But what made Mbappe look like he was on the path to becoming an all-time great was that, thanks to his skill in tight spaces and his explosive off-ball movement, he took a ton of shots that were also high-quality shots.
While Mbappé has attributed some of those struggles to himself and his own mental state, it also feels like more of a structural issue. At PSG, Mbappé played in much more intricate attacking systems and he had guys like Messi and Neymar setting him up. Madrid, meanwhile, lost their best passer, Toni Kroos, to retirement. And their most creative attacker, Vinicius Jr, prefers to play the same position as Mbappé.
Mbappé’s inability to seamlessly integrate into Madrid’s team should slightly alter our perception of him as a player — mutability is part of your value as a player — but his stellar and frankly never-before-seen track record should make us confident that he’ll eventually get back to scoring goals for fun.
He’s not there yet, though. He won’t be until he starts getting on the end of more chances from through balls and shots from the center of the penalty area. And what better challenge than Sunday’s against crosstown rival Atletico Madrid? Measured by xG per shot, only one team in Europe concedes lower quality chances than Diego Simeone’s side. — O’Hanlon
