What’s in a meme? A player and a league

Sponsors have walked away, and despite apologies from Mbappé, Real Madrid and the League, the League went dark in China over the weekend.

Mbappé has been portrayed online as running his club like a politburo. It seems he has now met his match.

2 min readNov 3, 2026 06:12 AM IST First published on: Nov 3, 2026 at 06:12 AM IST

Everyone is fair game for a meme, but memes can have consequences. Kylian Mbappé, captain of the French football team, is learning this the hard way. Asked about his favourite online joke, he picked one that superimposed his face on “some guy”, saying “I think he’s a Chinese dictator.” That “guy” was Mao Zedong. China’s response has turned a football meme into a diplomatic and commercial headache.

The Mbappé-as-dictator meme was born in a kebab shop in Marseille, after its owner was served a legal notice over a sandwich he called “as round as Mbappé’s skull”. The owner retorted that Mbappé “had turned his name into a dictatorship”. The internet ran with the joke, with phrases like “Dictator Mbappé” doing the rounds. The meme also drew upon a narrative of him wielding outsized influence in his previous club, Paris Saint-Germain.

Only the internet could have brought together two figures so disparate. But the controversy has now ballooned, it threatens La Liga’s ambitions in the Chinese market. Sponsors have walked away, and despite apologies from Mbappé, Real Madrid and the League, the League went dark in China. A meme about one man’s hold over a football club has been displaced by a different kind of power: It decides what may be said, and what it can cost to say it. Mbappé has been portrayed online as running his club like a politburo. It seems he has now met his match.