Kylian Mbappé’s Real Madrid career is in danger of wasting everyone’s time | Jonathan Wilson

Ppeople will tell you there is no such thing as club DNA. How could that be? The managers change, the players change, the directors and the backroom staff change. How can a club have a distinctive identity? How can Spurs be spursy? How can Bayern have Dusel? Why is Ajax still whining about playing the game well?

Often it makes little sense. A vote passed on by the fans perhaps? A culture that is passed on from player to player, from director to director? Is there something in the air around the stadium? But every now and then there are times when it’s completely clear why a club is the way it is, why it’s apparently stuck in a cycle of otherwise inexplicable behavior. Real Madrid act like Real Madrid because the club’s president, as he has been for three years since 2000, is Florentino Pérez. And there’s nothing Pérez likes more than a famous, expensive football player.

Post-Covid, when all of European football was feeling financial distress, Madrid seemed to have changed. The club made a series of sensible transfers, buying players along the way. Aurélien Tchouaméni, Eduardo Camavinga and Jude Bellingham weren’t exactly cheap – their combined cost was just over $250 million – but then again, they weren’t. galactic in the true sense of the word. They still had development to come and, in doing this together, seemed to be developing a mutually compatible style alongside Vinícius Júnior, Rodrygo and Fede Valverde. Perez fell Kylian Mbappe in this mix, which is starting to resemble events from the summer of 2003, when he bought David Beckham, but sold Claude Makélélé and destroyed the team’s balance sheet.

Madrid boycotted this year’s Ballon d’Or ceremony after it became clear Vinicius would not win. That rather begs the question why, if they are so indignant that Rodri was preferred to Vinicius, they brought in a player who plays in the same position as him and has very similar characteristics. for a huge sign-up fee. Vinícius likes to play on the left. He can play for long periods without being involved in the game. But he has ferocious speed, great skill and imagination and is a brilliant and unusual finisher. Just like Mbappe.

Last season the balance in the attacker seemed perfect. Bellingham played centrally but dropped deep, creating space for Vinícius from the left or Rodrygo from the right to dive inside. Add Mbappe to that and the result is a mess. Bellingham scored 19 times in 28 league matches last season; his goal against Osasuna on 9 November was his first for Real this season as he was forced to operate deeper. Rodrygo was eventually dropped, mainly because he wasn’t famous enough, while Mbappe, despite scoring six league goals, has become a frustrated figure for a team that has lost ground to Barcelona in La Liga and is off to a lackluster start. to their Champions League title defense.

Mbappé is of course a player of astonishing gifts, not only technically exceptional but also impossibly fast. It was intensely exciting to watch him tear Argentina apart at the 2018 World Cup. He was only 19 at the time, but seemed astonishingly mature. There seemed no limit to what he could achieve. Since then, his potential has remained frozen. Paris Saint-Germain, a club where he was rarely challenged and had enormous political influence, was a move that was almost destined to stunt his development.

On that team, in that competition, he could essentially do whatever he wanted with his talent. It all came very easily to him and the result was that he was often only briefly involved or not involved at all in major competitions. It was a similar story for France. In the semi-final and final of the 2022 World Cup, he had to be moved from his favored left flank to the center due to his refusal to follow the opponent’s right back. He did, and eventually turned it on in the final – although his hat-trick included two penalties and a stunning volley – but if he hadn’t pulled back like that, Argentina might not already be 2-0 up.

Mbappé has now left the France squad and is going through what his national coach Didier Deschamps called ‘a difficult period’ which ‘has a physical and a psychological element’. The break might do him some good; it’s certainly easy enough to understand why players need time off, given the unforgiving nature of the calendar. He has scored just once in his last eight games, but worse still, he seemed completely unable to figure out how to deal with Barcelona’s high line in the Clásico as he was offside eight times.

The fear must be that his time in Paris, when he was so rarely challenged, has dulled his edge so that he has forgotten how to solve problems on the pitch. Hopefully it will come back for him – and for football. But his case highlights the potential problems – even for the most talented players – if they choose the wrong club. Given the tactical problems, Real Madrid may not be the right choice for Mbappé either.

• This is an excerpt from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, the Guardian US’s weekly look at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Do you have a question for Jonathan? Email footballwithjw@theguardian.com and he will provide the best answer in a future edition