Kylian Mbappe on his way to setting unbreakable records

During the last World Cup, Kylian Mbappe firmly established himself as the next big star of global football with his sensational performance in the final, despite his team’s defeat. In the 4 years since, he’s mostly lived up to the hype.

But last season was a bit of a disaster for Real Madrid, and his numbers fell off along with the rest of his team. After scoring 24 non-penalty goals in La Liga during his debut campaign for Los Blancos, he managed just 17 last season. He was still one of the best attackers in the world, but it was enough of a dropoff in production that he was no longer spoken about as the singular superstar of the France attack. This newsletter included — we’ve argued that Michael Olise has been the best player for France at this World Cup.

And yet, Mbappe just keeps scoring sensational goals. He missed a penalty in the first half of the quarterfinal against Morocco, but bounced back to score one of the best goals of the tournament, giving his team a lead that they never looked like relinquishing for a second. It was a ridiculous display of quickness and technique, setting himself up in a tiny bit of space to perfectly curl his shot just inside the far post.

Mbappe can and does score in every way you can think of, but this is the closest thing he has to a signature goal. He’s better than anyone else in the world at cutting in off the left, finding a little pocket of space, and hitting that back post curler from about 15 yards.

So far in this World Cup, Mbappe hasn’t needed a high volume of shots to find the back of the net. He’s scored 7 non-penalty goals from 28 shots and just 3.18 xG.

For most players this would be considered an unsustainable overperformance, but Mbappe’s finished at pretty incredible rates throughout his career. He scored 21 from 13.47 xG in 2023-24, and 24 from 17.61 xG in 2024-25. Even in his most recent frustrating campaign, his 17 non-penalty goals came from 14.31 xG.

Internationally, Mbappe is on a pretty outrageous goal-scoring pace, as David Rudin points out. He’s obliterating the previous national records of Thierry Henry and Olivier Giroud, and he’s on better pace than Cristiano Ronaldo.

Mbappe is just 27 years old, and Ronaldo didn’t have this many international goals until he was 31. He might not be interested in standing around and sinking his team to farm penalty opportunities just to set a record, but he’s on the kind of pace where he could absolutely do that if he felt like it.

As for the rest of the match, Morocco barely had a shot. Once Ousmane Dembele added a second goal for France, the game was effectively over. Despite having plenty of possession and looking good at progressing the ball through the first line of France’s defense, Morocco lacked any kind of box presence or final third creativity. They ended the game with 5 shots, no chances of 0.1 xG or more, and just 8 box touches.

This game answered one of the remaining big questions about France, whether they could continue to play their style effectively against a team that controlled possession in midfield. Morocco aren’t nearly the same level as Spain in that regard, but this was a good enough piece of evidence for me to be confident that France should be strong favorites against whoever they meet in the semifinal.

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