Often criticized for his play without the ball and for his tendency to save himself in defensive tasks, Kylian Mbappé has other strengths. His ability to score more than 40 goals per season is a striking illustration of this. This is what allowed him to finish last season top scorer in La Liga, the Champions League, but also the World Cup despite a blank year in terms of trophies.
If some observers have sometimes considered that his goals were not enough to compensate for his lack of collective investment, even going so far as to put into perspective his individual performance which could harm his team, the captain of the Blues has another opinion. In an interview given to France Football before the Ballon d’Or ceremony, Mbappé defended his vision.
For Mbappé, his efficiency cannot be a problem
“If my goals are sometimes obscured by debates around my defensive runs or the kilometers covered? I think it’s not normal, but it’s the life of someone who has been around excellence for years. I’m not into anything new anymore. Everyone has known for years what I can do. And I think that’s where we enter the human framework. It’s human to always look at what someone isn’t doing. When he’s been doing it for ten years, we no longer look at what he’s doing. We know he knows how to do it. So we always try to look at what he’s not doing. From that moment on, it’s not something I take personally.”he explains.
For him, a player who scores will never be a problem in a team. If he says he accepts constructive criticism on certain aspects of his game, he recalls that the primary objective of football remains to score more than the opponent, and that in this sense, his goals remain essential. “It’s a speech that makes less sense. Because if I don’t score, people will ask me why I don’t score. Afterwards, I learned that, when you are a footballer, in every match you play, there are millions of coaches. And not all the coaches are happy at home. Everyone has their own point of view, but I think the goal of football is to score goals, to score one more than the opponent. A player who scores goals will never be a problem in a team, because I have never seen a team win titles by scoring zero goals. At least it’s clear.
