The year 2021 was very rough for Kylian Mbappe at both club and national team levels. In the said year, he failed to help Paris Saint Germain win the French Ligue 1 title for the first time since he joined the club from Monaco on August 31, 2017.
To crown it all, Mbappe who led the French national team to win the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia when he was just 19-year-old, led the team to Euro 2020 which took place between June 11 and July 11, 2021, and couldn’t be the difference.
Unfortunately for him and his teammates, the French national team received the shock of the tournament when Switzerland knocked out the reigning World Cup champions in the round of 16 stage of the European championship.
Funny enough, it was the country’s supposed talisman, Kylian Mbappe that let the country down by missing a spot-kick that would have changed the outcome of the game in favor of France.
Hence, some irate French national team supporters stormed his social media pages to racially abuse the 23-year-old striker.
The abuse became so severe that Mbappe wanted to quit the national team. He also wanted to leave PSG for Real Madrid in the summer of 2021. The most annoying part of the situation was that the French Football Federation’s (FFF) president, Noel Le Graet insisted that Mbappe was not racially abused.
“He thought that the federation had not defended him after his missed penalty and the criticism on social media. He no longer wanted to play for the France team”, Le Graet told Le Journal du Dimanche.
After Le Journal du Dimanche shared the above statement on Twitter recently, Kylian Mbappe tagged the tweet to reveal that it was not because he missed a penalty kick that wanted to force him out of the French team, it was because of the racism he suffered after losing it.
“Actually I explained to him (FFF president, Le Graet) very well that it was about racism and not the penalty. But he concluded that there had been no racism”, Mbappe tweeted on Sunday, June 19, 2022.
Oui enfin je lui ai surtout bien expliqué que c’était par rapport au racisme et NON au penalty.
— Kylian Mbappé (@KMbappe) June 19, 2022
Mais lui considérait qu’il n’y avait pas eu de racisme… https://t.co/wZ1nQfb4l4
Mbappe who is now the highest-paid footballer in the world after renewing his stay at PSG, shared this tweet days after a FIFA report confirmed that players who played in Euro 2020 and Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) were heavily abused on social media before, during, and after the tournaments. The report claimed that 80 percent of the online abuses were homophobic and racist insults.
Kylian Mbappe is good with the French national team now
Even though Kylian Mbappe recently refreshed his memory about the racist abuse he suffered after he missed the spot-kick in Euro 2020, everything seems to be well between him and the French national team now.
Recall that after the Euro 2020, Kylian Mbappe led the French national team to win the UEFA Nations League trophy for the first time in the country’s history.
Not only that, he scored four goals in the closing stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers which qualified France for the tournament without going through playoffs.
Hence, just like in 2018, French national team supporters will be counting on Mbappe to help France win a successive World Cup title in Qatar. The tournament will commence in November and end in December 2022.
Since he made his debut for the national team on March 25, 2017, Mbappe has scored 27 goals in 57 games for France in all competitions.
