Leading French sports paper L’Equipe has a picture of a scowling Mbappé on its front page and the telling headline “Disillusionment”.
The star forward also caught it in his grading, when he scored a humiliating two on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 worst, 10 best). “He was almost non-existent on the field,” added the paper to his assessment, saying that he was “a big disappointment” especially in the first half.
His partner in attack Randal Kolo Muani, who transferred to the giant of the French league from Frankfurt in the summer for more than two billion crowns, had an equally bad mark. “He was almost imperceptible, and when he got down to something, he made a mess,” he didn’t take a diary with a napkin.
However, PSG captain Marquinhos also caught it, also receiving a rating of 2. “His appeal to his team-mates at the start of the match to slow down the pace epitomized an overall poor performance,” wrote L’Equipe, who described Wednesday night as “PSG’s worst performance on the European stage in history”.
Achraf Hakimi, Manuel Ugarte and Goncalo Ramos, the other stars of Luis Enrique’s squad, received only a slightly better, but otherwise very poor grade of 3.
Criticism is also heard from other French newspapers. The newspaper Le Parisien emphasized that Mbappé sent the only shot on goal during the whole match, and that was only in the 84th minute from outside the penalty area. “A game where he was like a ghost,” said an article discussing the 24-year-old offensive star’s poor stats.
