You can’t just turn up on the first day and say: “hey you, pass me the ball,” Kylian Mbappé insisted, but that was then and this was now. And now he did almost exactly that, going around the pitch asking everybody where it was until someone said here and off he went, heading up the tunnel with it under his arm. It was still there 45 minutes later when he left the Estadio José Zorrilla on Saturday, messages from his teammates scrawled all over the yellow leather in black marker, dedicated to the man who had just led Real Madrid to a 3-0 victory over Real Valladolid: “Crack” – Fede Valverde. “Pressing Monster” – Luka Modric. “Congrats, my nine” – Jude Bellingham. And: “Ooh la la, brother” – Brahim Díaz.
“Grande, straight to Paris,” Rodrygo wrote. Instead, they were on their way back to Barajas, a 20-minute flight south. One former La Liga player carries a needle in his wallet after finding out the hard way that you can’t fly with an inflated ball on board but there are always exceptions and when Madrid embarked not long after midnight they were top, four points ahead of Atlético Madrid, temporarily 10 ahead of Barcelona. As for Mbappé, he was now Europe’s best striker this year, his eighth goal in 2025 having just completed a first hat-trick since arriving in Spain. “Here’s to many more, Kiki,” Fran García wrote, and no one doubts there will be.
Not now, they don’t. The first two goals at Valladolid were classic Mbappé, a clean inevitability about them, accelerating into that inside left position, body opening out, right footed, ball tracing an arc no one could intercept. The opener, the sixth time he has scored Madrid’s first, came from a neat one-two with Bellingham; the second from the kind of run beyond Rodrygo that brought to mind Jorge Valdano’s line about how when the original Ronaldo attacked it was like the entire herd attacked, a stampede coming. Thundering past, the Brazilian rolled it into his path and Mbappé guided the shot in as if it was as easy as the third would be, added from the spot in injury time.
Only that wasn’t always so simple, which was part of the point. Saturday’s penalty was the fifth Mbappé has scored for Madrid and this is a man whose nerve held in the World Cup final, but there was something a little cathartic about it. He has missed two in Madrid colours, an indecision in their execution that offered a portrait of the pressure, a player still trying to find his place: struck softly and mid-height, those shots inviting saves at Anfield at the end of November and San Mamés a week later. They also invited debate and if there were amateur psychologists everywhere – I have advice for sale but none for myself, the phrase goes – it turned out they weren’t so wrong. The night he missed against Athletic, Mbappé later admitted, he “hit rock bottom”.
As it turned out, that was the best thing that could have happened to him. Mbappé’s figures weren’t bad then, the kind of crisis most players would kill for. From week four, when he scored against Betis, his run of goals in the league read: 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1. Then came the clásico, when he didn’t score and instead got caught offside eight – yes, eight – times, and a 4-0 win over Osasuna when he didn’t get a goal either, but he did then score in the next two before Bilbao. Eight goals in 15 league games to go with another in the Champions League and one in the final of the European Super Cup wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t good either. Not Mbappé good, anyway. And he knew that better than anyone, felt it more than anyone too.
Patience is a virtue but no one has the time: he was supposed to tear it up from the start and they were supposed to be invincible. Instead, Madrid have been beaten five times – three more than in the whole of last season – and Mbappé wasn’t, well, Mbappé.
It is almost impossible to do justice to the kind of pressure Mbappé withstands, the threats and obligations, family dragged into it, his future literally a question of states with the weight of Qatar and France upon him. As Ibrahima Konaté put it: “I often say to him, I would love your football but not your life.” And if at last he was liberated, escaping to Spain seven years after the first call, the fight with PSG went on and he was a new player in a new country with new teammates, his place among them unclear: another footballer leaning left, spaces still to be found, toes to avoid treading on.
“I’m not mad: I know that when a player like me turns up a lot of things change,” he said in September, but if that was a statement of intent or simply reality, it wasn’t something to be forced at first. You don’t just turn up and say “it’s my team,” he said; “football doesn’t work like that.” This was a side that had won everything without him, after all. And he was a player who came with no preseason, didn’t join Madrid on tour and started the European Super Cup final in Poland seven days after his first session at Valdebebas. Chances came, if not always in the positions he was used to, and chances went again, too often untaken, ill at ease. The physical, tactical, and technical all played a part, but that was not all. “It was more a mental thing,” Mbappé said last week.
La Liga results
ShowLas Palmas 1-1 Osasuna, Mallorca 0-1 Betis, Atlético Madrid 1-1 Villarreal, Sevilla 1-1 Espanyol, Valladolid 0-3 Real Madrid, Vallecano 2-1 Girona, Sociedad 0-3 Getafe, Athletic 0-0 Leganes, Barcelona 7-1 Valencia
After he missed at Anfield, Madrid got two more penalties against Getafe. Mbappé handed the first to Bellingham and the second to Rodrygo (only for VAR to take it away again). When he stepped up at San Mamés, it came as an obligation as much as an opportunity, and when he missed it seemed like something a more profound than just a penalty. To him, particularly. They call San Mamés the Cathedral and there he saw the light through the dark. “That game in Bilbao was good for me because I hit rock bottom; that was the moment I saw I have to give everything for this shirt and play with personality,” he said.
This week he explained: “It was a good moment. It changed my mentality. I couldn’t do worse: I could only go upwards. I was good physically, good with the team and the group but I had to do more and I knew that. It was a moment of, bam!, change everything. I didn’t come to Madrid to play badly.”
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Up until San Mamés, Mbappé had scored 10 goals from 43 shots in 20 games. The following week, Carlo Ancelotti announced: “Mbappé’s period of adaptation is over”; the next day he scored against Sevilla. Since San Mamés, he has scored 12 in 12, scoring twice as fast as before, accelerating. He has eight in his last five games, six of them the opener, is two behind Robert Lewandowski in the Pichichi charts with 15 – Vinícius Júnior said after the Salzburg game that it was his job to help Mbappé finish top scorer – and has 22 goals in total. Madrid meanwhile have opened a gap at the top. “I am confused: I hear people saying we’re playing badly, but we’re leaders,” Ancelotti said. He also said: “with the four up front we’re never, never, going to have problems in attack – it’s the defending that’s the key.”
A little word from The Wolf wouldn’t go amiss here. Goals against Sevilla (one), Las Palmas (two) and Valladolid (three), Celta in the Cup (one) and Salzburg in the Champions League (one) are not definitive proof, the real measure of Mbappé. It is tempting too to note that Vinícius was missing against Sevilla, Las Palmas and Valladolid, that issue over the occupation of space perhaps not permanently resolved, although Ancelotti pointedly noted that the Frenchman is the best centre-forward in the world. And while Mbappé scored against Barcelona, Madrid lost the Super Cup final 5-2. Yet, in the middle of the mess that night he was genuinely superb, and on other nights too. To take his own calculations, he has been himself for a month and a half. Saturday’s hat-trick felt symbolic, marking a beginning, or the end of the beginning: he’s here now. “Magnifique,” ran the front of AS. “Killer Mbappé,” punned Marca. “He’s been playing well for some time and now he has scored a hat-trick for the first time,” Ancelotti said.
“When you’re a player like I am and there are so many expectations, you have to remain calm,” Mbappé said last week, the press room, like the pitch, a stage upon which to project the image of a man at ease, liberated at last and impressive with it. “I knew I could change the situation. Now I have to continue: playing well for a month is easy; at Madrid, you have to play well always. I was thinking too much. You could see it. I thought how to do this, how to move, how to go into space, if I go to the left, if I’m going into Vini’s zone, or Rodrygo’s zone … I thought a lot and when you think a lot you don’t play well. I wouldn’t say shy, that’s not the right word. It’s not shyness, exactly, not timidity. But when you get to a team like Real Madrid that has won everything the season before, you have to come with humility. You can’t come here and on the first day and say: ‘hey, you, pass me the ball’.”
Not then, you can’t, no. But this wasn’t the first day any more; it was the 194th and he had just scored his first hat-trick for Real Madrid. “My adaptation is over,” Mbappé said, heading off home with the ball in his hand.
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