Is Mbappé too good for France?

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — Five years ago, Kylian Mbappé almost quit the French national team.

France, a favorite in the Euro 2020 tournament, had just lost to Switzerland in the Round of 16. The French led for most of the game, only for the Swiss to score two late goals and force a penalty shootout. Mbappé ended up taking the deciding shot. The kick was strong, but the keeper reacted swiftly to bat it away.

The loss was catastrophic. ESPN called it a “huge failure.” The cover of Le Parisien, a French newspaper, the next day read “Disillusionment.” On L’Equipe: “Devastated.”

For Mbappé, just 22 years old at the time, this national letdown led to a wave of racist abuse on social media. One tweet went viral: A user wrote, “This dirty n***er deserves to receive a hundred lashes and be sold in Libya.” That Mbappé was born in Paris and had been an instrumental part of France’s World Cup win just a few years prior did not seem to matter.

“I cannot play for people who think I’m a monkey. I’m not gonna play,” Mbappé told the French Football Federation (FFF) President Noël Le Graët at the time.

Mbappé did end up playing, though. The very next year, he led the French all the way to their second straight World Cup Final in Qatar, where they lost in penalties to Argentina. This year, France is in the semifinals, set to play Spain on Tuesday.

Now in his prime, Mbappé is a better player than he was in 2021. He is the French captain and leading goal scorer and now has 20 goals in all World Cup competition, second all-time behind Lionel Messi.

But Mbappé’s status as one of the greatest soccer players of all time still doesn’t insulate him from abuse. Of Cameroonian and Algerian heritage, Mbappé stands, by his very existence, as either an example of the power of France’s multiculturalism or symptom of weakened French identity, depending on who is speaking.

Leading up to this year’s World Cup, Mbappé was embroiled in a public battle with France’s far-right National Rally leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. After Mbappé urged French citizens to be wary of the National Rally in a Vanity Fair profile, Le Pen and Bardella both struck back by pointing out that his former club, Paris Saint-Germain, won the UEFA Champions League once he had left.

Le Pen, a favorite to win next year’s French presidential election, has previously called to end all immigration into France, and once compared Muslims praying in the street to Nazi occupation.

The French team, made up largely of first- and second-generation immigrants, has rallied against Le Pen and her National Rally in the past. In 2024, Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and others on the team urged French citizens to vote, in response to a strong showing in the polls by the National Rally.

“Mbappé doesn’t represent French people with an immigration background,” Le Pen told CNN later that year. “Because there are far more of them living on the minimum wage, who can’t afford housing and can’t afford heating, than people like Mr. Mbappé.”

It’s a revealing, if bogus, argument, one that has been repeated by others in the party: Because Mbappé, or any non-white soccer player, is successful, he has lost his immigrant identity.

In reality, that success may be a buffer, but it’s not a barrier. After France knocked out Paraguay in this year’s World Cup, Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla launched her own racist tirade attacking Mbappé and his national identity. Amarilla called him a “colonized Cameroonian, pretending hard to be French” and wrote, “The brute didn’t even learn to write; instead of mother’s milk, he sucked on coconuts, and the most educated things he heard were chimpanzees.”

Amarilla later retracted the statements, saying they were “in the heat of the moment.” She then tried to claim that Mbappé’s rebuttal, a rejection of racism, was an example of gender-based violence. “Retract your remarks, honor your French citizenship and apologize to me,” she wrote in a letter posted on Instagram.

French President Emmanuel Macron publicly defended Mbappé, writing on X, “Another goal for Kylian Mbappé. Against racism this time.” Le Pen was silent.

Opposing fans and supporters alike have hurled racist abuse at Mbappé. While playing for club Real Madrid in Spain during the 2025-26 season, Mbappé was hounded by monkey chants in a match against Real Oviedo, which led to a fan being detained. When France lost the 2022 World Cup, Mbappé and other Black French players were once again bombarded with racist slurs and other hateful comments on social media — just as they were during the Euro 2020.

The fluctuating abuse from French fans is not unique to Mbappé. In 2011, striker Karim Benzema said: “If I score, I’m French. If I don’t score, or if there are problems, I’m Arab.” In 2022, defender Patrice Evra echoed his remarks: “When you win with France, you’re a French player. When you lose, suddenly, you get your Senegal passport.”

This line of thinking seemed less prevalent in 1998, the year Mbappé was born. Les Bleus were led by French Algerian Zinedine Zidane, Guadeloupe-born Lilian Thuram, Ghana-born Marcel Desailly and French Antillean Thierry Henry. The team’s diversity was celebrated, even nicknamed. The term “Black, Blanc, Beur” was coined — meaning Black, white, Arab, a play on the French flag, “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge.”

When the team won France’s first ever World Cup that summer, there was jubilation in the streets and a belief that this multiethnic, multiracial team would help unite France.

“It was a moment of communion,” Desailly recalled in 2018. “The fans, everybody was together. No racism, no discrimination, everybody was happy in France.”

The success of a multicultural team, though, did not mark a permanent victory for multicultural pride in France. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen and then head of the far-right party, claimed the team was not actually French — they were “artificial” he said, too African, too Black. “None of them has any place in a French team.”

Later, in 2011, Laurent Blanc, then coach of the French national team, was allegedly involved in discussions about imposing quotas on the national team to limit players of African descent. He was later cleared of racial discrimination.

Le Pen — although she once said Benzema should play for Algeria instead of France, and criticized the team after its 2010 World Cup loss in the group stage for having “another nationality in their hearts” — has softened the explicitly racist tone of the party in recent years. But it still lingers in her criticism of Mbappé and in her party’s thinly veiled attacks against a French team that boasts the multiculturalism of that 1998 squad. (While Le Pen now says little about the French team, when the team won the World Cup in 2018 in part thanks to a 19-year-old Mbappé, the only person she congratulated by name was Didier Deschamps, the white coach.)

This time, though, Le Pen’s views and her far-right party are more mainstream, and the question of who is French is contested even beyond France’s borders. Amarilla’s statement was explicit: A true French person would not have reacted as Mbappé did to racism. Does calling out racism make Mbappé less French?

It doesn’t matter how many goals Mbappé scores for France, or how many times he affirms his French pride. The altercation with Amarilla and the ongoing rift with Le Pen show that his identity remains up for political debate.

On Tuesday, Mbappé will once again wear the badge of France. If Les Bleus win, they will head to their third straight World Cup Final, and he will be a French hero. But what if they lose?

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