Mbappe China: Three Apologies Later, Round 11 Was Nowhere on Chinese TV

Round 11 of La Liga ran across 30 October to 1 November, ten matches in all. CCTV showed none of them. The five played on 30 and 31 October were Villarreal against Espanyol, Levante against Atlético Madrid, Rayo Vallecano against Celta Vigo, Real Betis against Málaga and Barcelona against Alavés. The remaining five, including Racing Santander against Real Madrid on 1 November, were also missing from the schedule. EFE confirmed the absence on 1 November. CCTV usually shows one or two matches from a round, and the empty schedule was the first time the suspension showed up as a whole round rather than a single pulled game. That was the position on 1 November, six days after the clip circulated on 26 October.

Migu kept most of the round. The streaming platform owned by China Mobile showed nine of the ten matches, Reuters reported, and the one it left out was Racing Santander against Real Madrid. The exception was Madrid. Migu is La Liga’s exclusive streaming partner in mainland China, under a deal signed in July that runs to 2030, and the match it omitted belonged to the club at the centre of the row.

Mbappé apologised on 27 October, in French, Mandarin and English. “My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurt many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world,” he said. La Liga apologised the same day, saying the remarks were made in a personal capacity and did not represent the league, and promised a protocol on awareness and communication. Real Madrid followed on 28 October. “Real Madrid CF wishes to express its apologies to the Chinese people for any discomfort caused by the recent words of our player Kylian Mbappé,” the club said in an official statement. The Chinese Football Association had demanded a public and formal apology from both player and club, after lodging what it called a stern protest. The demand was met. Javier Tebas, the La Liga president, met China’s ambassador to Spain, Yao Jing, and wrote on X that China “is and will continue to be a strategic partner for La Liga.” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, said Beijing took the apology seriously. Restrictions were reported on Mbappé’s accounts on Weibo and Xiaohongshu. By 1 November, China had announced no date for broadcasts to resume.

A medical researcher working in hospitals in China, posting as Dr. Luke, put the fan version of the week in one post on 26 October. “He’s huge here as well, he takes money from Chinese people, yet makes fun of them…. so many lucrative sponsorship deals with his face everywhere and on TV.. well it’s all gone now!” he wrote on X. He cited Dongqiudi, a football news platform. His post went up on 26 October, a day before the sponsors announced their decisions.

@skynet_tiantian’s post on 27 October opened with a single line in Chinese: “西甲在中国也一起没了！” La Liga in China is gone too, in translation. A third, from @myyangzi that morning, read: “Kylian Mbappé referred to Chairman Mao Zedong as a dictator of China, and this morning all brands in China deleted his picture and terminated his contract”. The three posts share a subject the official statements do not. Tebas and Guo spoke about a relationship to be protected. The posts speak about a weekend with nothing to watch, and no statement from either side has given those fans a date when the matches come back.

The image at the centre of the Mbappe China row is three years old. Younes Khelifi, a 35-year-old French computer developer who posts as @frenchaicovers, made it on a summer afternoon in 2023, joining two things that were already circulating online: jokes about Mbappé’s supposed influence over decisions at Paris Saint-Germain, and a recognisable image of Mao Zedong set to the Chinese song “Red Sun in the Sky.” He published the video on 14 August 2023. He told Infobae, in an interview published on 1 November, that there was no political message behind the choice, and that he had not set out to ridicule Mao or offend the Chinese people. Mbappé laughed about the meme when he was asked about his favourite meme of himself, and the clip circulated widely on 26 October. Khelifi woke to find a joke he had made for friends leading the news. “I feel sorry for Mbappé,” he said, in translation from the Spanish interview. He called the consequences disproportionate to what he described as a blunder without bad intention, and said he regretted nothing. Messages reached him from China, he said, mostly friendly, supportive or curious, with a few threats, and nothing official.

The commercial break came on 27 October. Three sponsors acted on one day. Dongpeng, the beverage maker also known as Eastroc, Mengniu, the dairy company, and Shanghai Milkground Food Tech, the cheese maker, ended their agreements with Mbappé in similarly worded statements. Each opposed “any words and actions that hurt national sentiment,” the Associated Press reported. His face had been on advertisements across China, in subway stations and inside elevators, the AP reported. Konami, the maker of eFootball, said it had suspended promotional content featuring Mbappé in its games and stopped producing player items and character cards for him in the Chinese versions of eFootball, eFootball Online and eFootball: King of Collectibles. “We immediately suspended all promotional content related to the player within our games,” Konami said in a statement on Tuesday. The company said it would announce further measures in due course.

China and the United States together finance the majority of La Liga’s international broadcast rights, a source inside the league told Agence France-Presse, putting the pool at 748 million euros for the 2024-25 season. Marca, the Madrid sports paper, put the share of Real Madrid’s shirt and merchandise sales coming from China at 10 to 15 percent. The club’s Chinese sponsors, Hisense, Kaiyun Sports and Linglong Tire, have not been reported to have withdrawn. Migu’s position in the middle of the split is the newest part of the commercial picture. La Liga and China Mobile’s Migu signed their agreement on 31 July at Migu’s headquarters in Beijing, Javier Tebas signing with the company’s chairman, Shen Wenhai. The deal made Migu the league’s exclusive new media partner in mainland China for four seasons, 2026-27 to 2029-30, with all 380 matches a season live. The term runs to 2030. It followed a three-year partnership that ran from 2022-23 to 2024-25. The suspension arrived in the first months of the new term.

Spanish football has seen this shape of punishment before, with a different player and a different league. In December 2019, Mesut Özil, then at Arsenal, denounced China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. CCTV dropped Arsenal’s match against Manchester City from its schedule and showed a recorded game between Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers instead. Arsenal distanced itself at once. The club said on Weibo that the remarks were Özil’s personal opinion. PP Sports, the other Chinese broadcast partner, later showed Arsenal again, but its commentators would not say Özil’s name. His avatar was removed from video games in China, and searches for his name returned error messages, the New York Times reported in October 2020. Arsenal removed Özil from the merchandising for Chinese New Year that winter.