On Sunday afternoon in the Spanish capital, Real Madrid fans will finally get to see Kylian Mbappe play in the club’s white shirt at their Bernabeu home ground.
Many will recall some of his previous appearances at the stadium — including his impressive display for Paris Saint-Germain against Madrid in their Champions League last-16 second leg in February 2022.
Back then, some at Madrid took it as a given that Mbappe would be joining them that summer. Perhaps good things come to those who wait? Newly-promoted Real Valladolid — Madrid’s opponents this weekend — might see things differently.
The second best seat at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, reserved for the president of the visiting club, has a special name allocated to it for Sunday. As Real Valladolid are the guests for Real Madrid’s first home fixture of the new season, the chair is for Ronaldo Nazario, twice a winner of the Ballon d’Or, if he wants it. He owns the newly promoted Valladolid and if he can scarcely be optimistic about their chances this weekend, he’ll at least have a special curiosity about the occasion.
Twenty-two summers ago the same Ronaldo strode on to the Bernabéu pitch wearing the Real No 9 jersey that had become his after the most newsworthy transfer of 2002, an angsty tug-of-war with the selling club, Inter Milan. There were doubts about how the Brazilian would fit into Real’s stellar forward line. It took him 61 seconds of his debut to score. After another 14 minutes he had a second.
Fifteen summers ago, a different Ronaldo, subject of another drawn-out transfer, his from Manchester United, was putting on the Real No 9 for his Bernabéu bow. He marked the day with a goal, the first of 450 for the club, most of them wearing the No 7 that Portugal’s Ronaldo would later build into his CR7 patent. But it’s that No 9 shirt that sets the toughest bar for auditions in front of a partisan crowd.
The legend goes all the way back to Alfredo Di Stéfano, the greatest wearer of that jersey, the originator of the long will-he-or-won’t-he transfer saga — in his case so complex that it prompted Spanish government intervention — and a goalscorer on his home debut, 70-odd years ago.
All those precedents would be familiar to anybody who has studied Real Madrid as thoroughly as their new No 9, Kylian Mbappé. As a kid he had posters of the Portuguese Ronaldo on his bedroom wall. He was already visiting the club’s training ground from his native France at the age of 13. Mbappé’s Bernabéu debut has been vividly imagined for several different Augusts before this one.
Now that he’s finally in, at 25 years old, all his past transfer volte-faces, such as the 11th hour intervention by the French president Emmanuel Macron to halt his 2022 move from Paris Saint-Germain, are mere anecdotes to align Mbappé’s Madrid beginnings with those other giants of the club’s history.
“It’ll be a lovely day for Mbappé, first time in the Bernabéu in a Real Madrid shirt,” predicted Carlo Ancelotti, the head coach, having spent the past ten days as concerned with sudden absentees as with welcoming his new figurehead striker. Ancelotti learnt on Friday that Jude Bellingham will miss up to five club games — and next month’s England internationals — with a muscle problem. He is already without the injured Edu Camavinga and, for Sunday, the suspended Ferland Mendy, which deprives Mbappé of three influential allies for his big day.
Still, Ancelotti insisted, “the fans will enjoy it.” Though it seems unlikely that the France captain will open his home account as quickly as big Ronaldo did, There’s anticipation Mbappé will soon be bursting past defenders as often — and even faster — than either of the Ronaldos used to. Mbappé probably won’t win five consecutive European Cups, like Di Stéfano, but according to the initial audits from Real’s official sales channels, his other superstar indices are already soaring. The 2024-25 No 9 shirt is selling far more replicas than the Ronaldo Nazario or Cristiano Ronaldo versions did in their first three months at the club.
The benchmark here is David Beckham, the most marketable of the Real recruits of the so-called galáctico era of the early 2000s, when the England captain joined Brazil’s Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Luís Figo and Raúl. While Beckham’s arrival stirred anxieties about whether the starting XI was veering recklessly to an excess of attacking players, the concerns were soothed, from the president Florentino Pérez’s point of view, by the number of branded accessories being retailed at the club’s superstores.
“Mbappé-mania” carries some of the same baggage — a newcomer who tops the hierarchy of stars but seems less easily placed in the tactical jigsaw. “We’re a very attacking side and maintaining defensive balance is vital,” snapped Ancelotti after day one of Mbappé’s Liga career ended 1-1 away to Real Mallorca, the Liga and European champions giving up an early lead and some of the breezy swagger they had brought back from Warsaw and Mbappé’s goalscoring away debut in the Uefa Super Cup against Atalanta. “We could have lost to Mallorca because of our lack of balance.”
Nor is Ancelotti ready to let that message rest. “Balance is about all the players focusing together and it’s everybody’s problem, not just the strikers, the midfielders or the defenders,” he added. “It’s a problem for a team who haven’t understood it’s a key issue.”
Players who have served longer in the dressing room than Mbappé know this sort of public hectoring from Ancelotti is rare. But they recognised the Italian was right about tactical imbalances. They have seen the data and the heat maps from the Mallorca game that showed Mbappé, the decisive Vinícius Júnior, the assertive Bellingham and Rodrygo, the goalscorer in Mallorca, all concentrating their runs, on and off the ball, towards the left side of the pitch, leaving broad areas undermanned.
Anticipating the white heat of Mbappé’s home bow, Ancelotti altered the schedule so Saturday’s training takes place not at the training headquarters bearing Di Stéfano’s name, but at the Bernabéu, a stadium substantially renovated since Mbappé last played there for Paris Saint-Germain.
There, Ancelotti will issue some more reminders about basic geometry. Mbappé may instinctively prefer the same wing Vinícius owns; Bellingham, when fit, may lean towards its adjacent channel; and Rodrygo may delight in cutting inside, left to right. But there’s a big wide space to cover. And 80,000-odd have not paid top dollar to go home thinking the only good seats in the house are the ones next to the superstar traffic jam on Madrid’s left flank.
