Cristiano Ronaldo is Kylian Mbappe’s idol — and there are lots of parallels between the pair’s first seasons playing for Real Madrid.
Both were presented in front of more than 80,000 fans at the club’s Bernabeu stadium. Last summer, Mbappe even copied Ronaldo’s words from the Portugal forward’s 2009 unveiling when he finished his opening speech to supporters at the event by saying, “One, two, three… Hala Madrid!”.
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But the pair joined very different Madrid sides.
A 24-year-old Ronaldo had moved from Manchester United for a world-record £80million ($104m at current exchange rates) fee weeks after Madrid had watched arch-rivals Barcelona lift a historic treble under Pep Guardiola, which included thrashing them 6-2 at the Bernabeu in the May. Mbappe, at age 25, was added as a free agent to a squad that had just been crowned Spanish and European champions following the expiration of his contract at Paris Saint-Germain.
With his brace against Leganes at the weekend, Mbappe has now equalled Ronaldo’s 33 goals from his 2009-10 debut season with Madrid and has almost two full months of his still to play, but how do their first campaigns in the famous white shirt compare?
The Athletic takes a look.
Individual performance
Mbappe’s 33 goals so far this season have come from 46 appearances at a rate of 0.72 goals per match, whereas Ronaldo scored his 33 in 35 games at an impressive rate of 0.94 per game.
That difference is reflected in the chart below. Mbappe’s line has more flat sections as he has failed to score in 46 per cent of his matches, compared to just 34 per cent for Ronaldo.
Mbappe is closer to Ronaldo’s total ‘game state-changing’ goals — defined as those efforts that put a team ahead or draw them level in a game. Ronaldo scored 14 of these in La Liga and four in the Champions League, while Mbappe has 13 and four in those competitions so far.
Ronaldo was key in games against Villarreal, Athletic Club and Marseille, while Mbappe has thrived against more difficult opponents such as Atletico Madrid, Sevilla and Manchester City. His February hat-trick against the latter in the Champions League’s new play-off round was his breakthrough night at the Bernabeu after a mixed start to his Madrid career.
Adaptation and problems off the pitch
It was not plain sailing for either star forward in their first year with Madrid.
Ronaldo scored nine goals in his first seven games but then injured his right ankle in the October and missed two months of action. He was also sent off twice, the first time a second yellow for a mistimed kick on Almeria’s Victor Ortiz in early December and the second a straight red for an elbow the following month that fractured Malaga left-back Patrick Mtliga’s nose, so he lost another three matches to suspension.
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Mbappe has only missed two league games, both due to muscle injuries, and was able to recover from a broken nose suffered playing for France in the European Championship last summer without the need for surgery. He initially struggled to fit into manager Carlo Ancelotti’s winning system. His favoured left-winger position was occupied by Vinicius Junior when he arrived, so he has played down the middle instead.
Madrid sources — who, like all those cited in this article, asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships — think the months before Mbappe’s arrival, when he experienced tensions with the PSG board, meant he lost some of his spark and intensity.
Mbappe and Vinicius Jr both prefer to play off the left (David Ramos/Getty Images)
Mbappe scored — and lifted his first Madrid trophy — on his debut in August’s UEFA Super Cup against Atalanta, but it took him until his fourth game to get his first La Liga goals for the club. He has also missed penalties in defeats to Liverpool in the Champions League and Athletic Club in La Liga in the space of a week in November and early December, describing the latter as the moment he “reached the bottom” in an interview with Real Madrid TV.
Both players have been part of damaging defeats to Barcelona during their first seasons in Spain.
Ronaldo failed to score as his side were beaten 1-0 at Camp Nou (in his first game back from the ankle injury mentioned above, he was substituted just after the hour) and then 2-0 at the Bernabeu, while Mbappe and company have suffered a 4-0 La Liga home demolition in October and then a 5-2 loss on the neutral turf of Saudi Arabia in January’s Supercopa de Espana final — although he did open the scoring and play well overall in the latter. (The sides will meet at least twice more this season though, in the Copa del Rey final in Seville on April 26 and the reverse league fixture a couple of weeks later, and could also face each other in the Champions League final in Munich on May 31 as they are on opposite sides of the last-eight draw.)
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Ronaldo was accused of sexual assault at a Las Vegas hotel in June 2009, just before he joined Madrid. In 2022, a federal judge agreed that a lawsuit brought by Kathryn Mayorga should not proceed, as her lawyer had tainted the process by relying on hacked documents. Ronaldo has always strongly denied her accusations.
In December, an investigation into an alleged rape in Stockholm, Sweden, in October that reports had linked Mbappe to was closed due to a lack of sufficient evidence. Mbappe strongly denied those stories when they surfaced and his lawyer said he believed he had “nothing to be reproached for”.
Team performance
Mbappe playing more games than Ronaldo is not just to do with injuries and suspensions — Madrid simply have more fixtures per season now than they did in 2009-10.
The new Champions League format has brought four extra matches (two more in the league phase and two in that play-off to reach the round of 16), while last season’s successes mean Madrid have played in the UEFA Super Cup, the Intercontinental Cup (the new name for the old-format annual Club World Cup, albeit they only had one match in it) and the four-club Supercopa de Espana. Mbappe has already lifted silverware in the first two of those competitions, while Ronaldo had to wait until the Copa del Rey final in his second campaign for his first trophy with Madrid.
The creation of FIFA’s new-look Club World Cup will give Mbappe further opportunities to add more goals and another debut-season medal this summer, with a possible seven matches in the United States-hosted tournament for Madrid if they go all the way to the final on July 13.
Perhaps surprisingly, Madrid are chasing a first treble of La Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League in their history — they are three points behind league leaders Barcelona in second place with nine games left, face Arsenal in the Champions League quarter-finals over the next two midweeks and reached the Copa del Rey final with an aggregate 5-4 win against Real Sociedad in the semis this week.
Madrid are already doing better in 2024-25 than they did in Ronaldo’s first season. That summer of 2009 also saw Florentino Perez return for a second term as their president and make a host of signings as well as Ronaldo, including Kaka, Karim Benzema and Xabi Alonso in a then club-record outlay of over €250million (£208m/$270m at current exchange rates).
Ronaldo and Kaka were two among a host of stars signed by Madrid in 2009 (Jasper Juinen/Getty Images)
Ronaldo was out with his ankle injury as Madrid suffered a humiliating 4-1 aggregate defeat to third-tier Alcorcon in the Copa del Rey’s round of 32 in the November, a shock result which became known as ‘El Alcorconazo’. The Portuguese star was fit for the Champions League round-of-16 tie against Lyon and scored in the second leg at the Bernabeu, but could not prevent Madrid from being eliminated at that stage for the sixth season in a row.
Madrid finished on 96 points in La Liga — a club record at the time — but Guardiola’s Barcelona did even better to take the second of three successive titles with 99.
What happens next?
The 33 goals Ronaldo scored that season was his lowest total in nine years with Madrid. His second-worst haul was 42 in 2016-17.
Spurred on by his individual battle with Barcelona forward Lionel Messi, the pair monopolized the Ballon d’Or for a decade, with Ronaldo being voted the world’s best footballer for the previous 12 months four times in five years from 2013 to 2017 (to go with his 2008 win when he was at United). He won four Champions Leagues, two La Liga titles and two Copas del Rey with Madrid, among other team trophies, and was their record scorer with 450 goals in 438 games when he left for Italian side Juventus in the summer of 2018.
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Just the 418 to go for Mbappe, then… although Ancelotti believes the Frenchman could emulate his childhood idol.
“Mbappe has a lot of quality and can match Cristiano, but Cristiano has set the bar very high,” Ancelotti said before this week’s Copa del Rey semi-final second leg. “Mbappe is starting now at Madrid, he has enthusiasm… But it’s not going to be so easy for Mbappe to reach Cristiano’s level, he has to work.”
In the meantime, the legend and his Madrid heir apparent keep in touch, as Mbappe himself has acknowledged.
“He was my idol as a kid and now he’s a friend, I’m lucky,” he said in the Bernabeu’s mixed zone after scoring his 32nd and 33rd goals of the season at the weekend in a 3-2 home win against Leganes. “He gives me a lot of advice and that’s a privilege.”
In an interview on the programme Los Amigos De Edu in February, Ronaldo backed Mbappe to succeed at the Bernabeu.
“I say to the Real Madrid fans, take care of the kid,” said Ronaldo, who is still playing in the Saudi Pro League with Al Nassr at age 40. “Mbappe is very good and Real Madrid have to help him and protect him. I have no doubt that Mbappe is going to bring a lot of joy to Real Madrid fans.”
He has already brought plenty of that to those supporters in his first eight months at the club.
Additional contributor: Conor O’Neill
(Top photos: Getty Images)
