It hasn’t been the best few months for Kylian Mbappé.
The French superstar striker entered the 2026 World Cup with his team as clear favorites to win the tournament, only to come up well short, losing 2-0 to Spain in the semifinals. Then, on Monday night, he lost the Ballon d’Or, the award given out to the best player in international soccer, to Harry Kane.
Though Mbappé was brilliant in the “El Classico” against Barcelona, scoring a brace in the rivalry match, through the first 10 matches of the La Liga season, Real Madrid’s goal differential of +15 pales in comparison to Barca’s +29. He also refused to fully wear a shirt worn by the rest of his teammates, to reaffirm Cueta’s status as a part of Spain after an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration from Morocco.
But on Tuesday, his season somehow got even worse.
Mbappé bent the knee to China and the Chinese Communist Party, after an appearance on “The Bridge,” a French talk show hosted by a teammate, Aurelien Tchouameni. His big offense? Laughing at a meme.
The one “that makes me laugh the most,” he said, is “the one where there’s a video of a guy, I think it’s a Chinese dictator, they put my [face over it]. The show then cut to an example of the meme, his face covering an image of what looks to be Mao Zedong.
Mao was, by any reasonable definition, a dictator. And a brutal, malicious, and violent one. Most historians blame Mao’s policies for tens of millions of deaths through famine and politically motivated persecution. It’s not a stretch to describe him as evil, and one of history’s greatest villains.
But in the modern world of professional sports, there are a few protected groups that must be protected at all costs, and the Chinese Communist Party is one of them. Why? Because there’s money to be made for La Liga and Real Madrid in China, and telling the truth about the CCP’s abuses is apparently forbidden.
“My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurt many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world,” Mbappé wrote in a humiliating statement on Tuesday. “I apologize to everyone my words have upset. I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history, and I am sincerely sorry.”
If that wasn’t enough, the entire Spanish soccer league added their own groveling, ridiculous apology.
“La Liga deeply regrets the offense caused by Kylian Mbappé’s recent comments among Chinese fans. These comments were made in a personal capacity and do not represent LALIGA. To the extent of our institutional responsibility, we apologize on behalf of LALIGA and all its clubs,” the league said.
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He’s just the latest in a long list of athletes and personalities whose concern for human rights and social justice ends at the Chinese border. And OutKick’s Dan Dakich took him to task for how he handled it.
“I don’t think people fully understand soccer is, and how big soccer players like Mbappé are, all across the world. Mbappé, if you remember, one of the stars of the World Cup when he came to the USA,” Dakich said.
“Mbappé has all kinds of commercials, all kinds of billboards, all kinds of business interests all over China, including anything from cheese to soft drinks … you name it, he’s got a huge, huge presence in China. Well, that’s all being threatened to go away, because as you know based on what happened with Daryl Morey and others, China doesn’t take kindly to any kind of slur.”
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Sure enough, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, of course, immediately criticized Mbappé’s remarks.
“If you’re going to get in bed with Communist China, if you’re going to get in bed with somebody that isn’t as open and free thinking as we are and Europeans are, then you better shut your damn mouth. You know, you better just sit back, take your money, and quit screwing around.”
The freedoms that many athletes take for granted here are not present everywhere. And Dakich brought up that there’s no awareness of how lucky they are to play where they do.
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“You can be political here in the United States because we enjoy freedoms that others don’t,” he said. “But when you come at China, they react. This is going to cost Mbappé a ton of money. A ton. I mean, this is going to be something that he cannot recover from now. Does he care? Don’t know. Should he care, don’t know? I don’t even a little bit.
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“But I got to tell you, they always back down. Hell, you think LeBron James would practice his golf swing if he was in China listening to the Chinese anthem? Hell no. No, they’re always back because it’s big money.”
That’s the reality, that Mbappé and James and all the rest of them will do anything to avoid taking a hit to their wallet, no matter how embarrassing and humiliating it is. They’re the first to speak out on social issues when it’s free, and the first to back down when it matters.
