When Olivier Giroud reaches for the moment that captures Kylian Mbappé best, he does not pick a goal or an assist. He picks a photograph. Lusail, 18 December 2022, the 80th minute of a World Cup final France would eventually lose on penalties to Argentina. Mbappé has just thumped in his second of the night, his hat-trick still half an hour away. As he wheels off, arms wide, the first team-mate to crash into him is Giroud, ten years older, eight inches taller, screaming into the 22-year-old’s ear. The picture sits framed in Giroud’s home in Los Angeles. “That image,” the 39-year-old says, “sums up what we actually have.”
Giroud, speaking before France’s 2026 World Cup quarter-final against Brazil in Dallas, has used a long sit-down with French outlet L’Équipe to push back at the caricature of Mbappé that has hardened around the Real Madrid forward over the past three years. The accusation, repeated through dressing-room leaks, Ballon d’Or campaigns and contract sagas in Paris and Madrid, is that Mbappé is aloof, calculating, in love with his own brand. Giroud, retired from international football since the Euro 2024 exit and now winding down at LAFC, says the player he shared a France attack with for eight years is none of those things.
The photo, and what it actually shows
The celebration in Lusail came after Mbappé converted from the penalty spot to make it 2-1, dragging France back from a game that had been slipping for an hour. Giroud, withdrawn at half-time by Didier Deschamps with France 2-0 down, was already in a tracksuit. He sprinted the length of the technical area to reach him. “People saw a goal. I saw a kid carrying the team on his back at 23, and I wanted him to feel that we were behind him,” Giroud said. “He hugged me first. Always. That is not the behaviour of someone who thinks he is above the group.”
The two were not, on paper, natural allies. Giroud arrived in the France squad in 2011, when Mbappé was 12. They competed for the same shirt at Euro 2020, when Deschamps’ decision to drop Giroud for the Round of 16 defeat by Switzerland triggered open friction between the pair. Giroud has never hidden that the spell was difficult. “We had a conversation. A real one. Not through agents, not through journalists. Face to face. After that, there was no problem.” He scored his record-breaking 52nd France goal in Doha with Mbappé providing the assist.
The misread superstar
Giroud’s argument is structural as much as personal. Mbappé, he says, has been a national-team starter since 18, a global commercial asset since 19, and the heir to Zinedine Zidane’s symbolic weight since the 2018 World Cup. The room he has to be a normal team-mate has shrunk every year. “He is not arrogant. He is protective. There is a difference. When you have been chased since you were a teenager, you build walls. Inside those walls he is funny, he is generous, he remembers everyone’s name, he asks about your kids.”
He cited three specific episodes the French public never saw:
- A handwritten note Mbappé left in Giroud’s locker after his record-breaking goal against Poland in Doha.
- A private dinner Mbappé organised for the 2018 World Cup squad on the five-year anniversary of the Moscow final, paid for personally, no press, no social media post.
- A phone call the morning Giroud announced his international retirement in July 2024, lasting 40 minutes, in which Mbappé “cried more than I did”.
What it means for France in Dallas
The timing is not accidental. Mbappé arrives at AT&T Stadium on Saturday with four goals in five matches at this World Cup, the captain’s armband, and a French press that has spent the tournament debating whether his body language against Belgium in the last 16 was “disengaged”. Deschamps, in his final tournament before handing over to Zinedine Zidane in August, has publicly defended him twice in a week.
Giroud’s intervention reads as a deliberate counterweight from inside the tent. France have not beaten Brazil at a World Cup since the 2006 quarter-final in Frankfurt, Thierry Henry’s famous volley from Zidane’s free-kick. They will need Mbappé at the level of Lusail 2022, when he became the first man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final since Geoff Hurst in 1966 and still finished a loser. “He has unfinished business,” Giroud said. “And he is not the person you think he is. Look at the photo again.”
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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