The creator of the Mbappé montage says he wants to apologise

“I would ask Mbappé to forgive me.” That is what Younes Khelifi says he would like to tell Kylian Mbappé after the controversy sparked by a montage featuring the player. The 28-year-old French creator recounts how the video came about and says he never intended to hurt the player or Chinese people.

The montage was made in the summer of 2023. Khelifi works as a programmer, follows football out of passion and runs Frenchaicovers on X, where he shares humorous edits, including ones made with artificial intelligence. He says that, at the time, there were rumours that Mbappé might leave PSG and that the player seemed to have the club’s leadership under his control. When his continuation was announced, Khelifi says the image of Mbappé as the club’s “supreme leader” came to mind. He says he automatically connected the player with Mao Zedong, after singing a popular song in the car with supporters for fun.

“It was just a joke about current events. I never thought it would leave France,” he says. Khelifi says Mbappé had shown the montage to his teammates, and that he was pleased the player had seen it. He describes Mbappé as a young man who laughs at everything and says he was not surprised that the player could joke about himself as well.

The situation changed when the controversy erupted in China. Khelifi says he initially felt overwhelmed and wondered whether he should find a lawyer to defend himself, perhaps against Mbappé’s entourage or LaLiga. After thinking it over, he says he decided he had done nothing wrong because he had never wanted to hurt Chinese people or the player. He describes the video as a joke that led to economic and geopolitical consequences whose scale he struggles to grasp.

Khelifi says he believes Mbappé deeply regrets the situation and sees it as a misunderstanding over the player’s words. He says friends in China told him that people there were more troubled by what Mbappé had said than by the video itself. Khelifi, meanwhile, says neither the player’s entourage nor Real Madrid has contacted him, an absence that surprises him. He sent Mbappé a message on Instagram but received no reply.

The controversy has also affected a personal plan: Khelifi had been preparing a trip to China and hopes people there do not hold the matter against him. He says he cannot grasp the scale of the reported losses and has not been told about them directly. José Antonio Camacho, for his part, warned Mbappé and Real Madrid over the controversy, saying they “think they are the masters of the world.”

Khelifi acknowledges that his montage helped create the situation, even if indirectly. He would like to apologise to Mbappé and imagines a simple meeting: “A coffee and a handshake.”