Kylian Mbappé is arguably the best soccer player on the planet.
In 2018, he led France to a World Cup championship over Croatia as a 19-year-old.
Four years later, he did everything in his power offensively to get France across the line for back-to-back championships, ultimately falling to Lionel Messi and Argentina in the best World Cup Final in history.
And coming into the 2026 iteration across North America, the matured Mbappé, now at Real Madrid, wants to make it a three-peat in the World Cup Finals, with this time a second trophy coming home to Paris.
But for everything great about Mbappé as a player — his speed, shooting, creativity, and technical ability — there is one problem with the 27-year-old: He doesn’t play defense.
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Sure, that is said about a lot of the best attacking soccer players in the world. That’s for most sports with non-stop action like basketball and hockey. The best players generally give up a bit on defense so they can focus on offense.
That is not the case with Mbappé.
He doesn’t play defense.
Not like he’s bad at defense — the French attacker literally doesn’t contribute at all to the defensive side of the game.
Opta, a leader in sports analytics in soccer, took the average defensive actions each player across the top 20 leagues in the world makes per game, and literally every single player contributed more defensively to their club than Mbappé at Real Madrid.
Out of 6,044 players, Mbappé ranked second-to-last.
This includes players in leagues who are in their 40s.
When it comes to defense, Mbappé not only doesn’t contribute, he doesn’t even think about that side of the ball. If France ever had to park the bus for whatever reason, Mbappé might actually have to bring up a map to find where his team’s penalty box is located.
So when you watch Mbappé in the World Cup these next two months, don’t be alarmed if he’s not helping on the defensive end. That’s not an outlier, that’s just Mbappé.
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