Kylian Mbappe’s first season at Real Madrid was a campaign steeped in controversy, and now the France international has elected to make a change that he hopes will signal a more successful second year in Spain.
Mbappe ended the 2024/25 campaign as Los Blancos top scorer with 44 goals in 59 games, but Carlo Ancelotti’s side came up short when it came to winning trophies.
During his time at PSG, Mbappe wore the No.7 shirt, but he was unable to take that jersey at Real Madrid as it is owned by Vinicius Junior. He, therefore, picked up the No.9.
For the 2025/26 season, though, Mbappe is set to take the No.10 shirt that has been vacated by the departing Luka Modric, Marca reports.
What Mbappe’s squad number change means
While this squad number change may irritate some supporters who already have an Mbappe 9 shirt, it is also a subtle message to new head coach Xabi Alonso.
Publicly, Mbappe has always said that he will play where his team wants him to.
“I can play in any position – right, left, or centre. Wherever the coach wants, I’ll go,” he said when signing for the club. “It doesn’t matter where – what matters is helping the team and scoring goals.”
Privately, though, the story is different for Mbappe, a player who has earned the reputation of saying all the right things in public only to harbour different opinions behind closed doors.
At PSG, he was notoriously unhappy when asked to play as a centre-forward and attacked head coach Christophe Galtier with a notorious ‘pivot gang’ post on Instagram.
These claims have followed him to Real Madrid. Sport quoted an anonymous source close to Los Blancos claiming he is “fed up” playing as a No.9 and that he “doesn’t want to play as a centre-forward”.
Moving away from the No.9 jersey, a shirt so synonymous with the game’s best centre-forwards, should help Mbappe get the message across that he does not see himself in that role under Alonso in the long term.
It also adds more pressure on Vinicius Junior. The Brazil star is unsettled at the club and pushing for a bigger contract in the wake of interest from the Saudi Pro League. With Mbappe making it clear that he does not see himself as a centre-forward, he is logically out to displace the South American on the left.
With the Real Madrid board growing frustrated with Vini Jr, could they choose to sell him for a world-record fee and use that to sign a natural centre-forward and allow Mbappe to move wide? It seems like a logical sequence of events.
Posing Alonso a problem
All of this, of course, is likely to take place in the long term. Alonso used either a 3-5-2 or 4-3-1-2 system during the Club World Cup, meaning the left-wing role that both Mbappe and Vini Jr prefer is unavailable.
The role as part of a forward two is not one that is totally alien to Mbappe, who has featured in a similar system with France before. However, with Karim Benzema also featuring in that setup, he was still given the type of freedom that he has historically thrived upon.
How best to use Mbappe is one of the biggest questions that Alonso has to answer as he settles in at Real Madrid. What’s increasingly clear is that he doesn’t see himself as a centre-forward in the long term.
