Kylian Mbappe’s fake bath interview proves the Ballon d’Or discourse has entered AI dystopia

I will stop
I will stop at nothing
Say the right things
When electioneering 
I trust I can rely on your vote

We can practically hear the interminable cowbell from Radiohead’s OK Computer deep cut ‘Electioneering’ when it comes to Kylian Mbappe’s media tour over the past month.

The Real Madrid Galactico has had better years.

He scored 19 fewer goals than Harry Kane in all competitions last season. He lifted zero trophies. Kane’s Bayern Munich eliminated Mbappe’s Madrid from Europe, and Kane’s England beat Mbappe’s France in the World Cup third-fourth place play-off.

Granted, Mbappe finished as the top scorer in La Liga, the Champions League and World Cup, but he wasn’t named the best player – and was never really in contention to be – in any of those competitions.

Real Madrid and PSG have won four Champions Leagues between them in the past five seasons. Mbappe has represented both clubs over that time but has precisely zero to his name himself. There might be something in that.

It was only a few months ago that he was deafeningly whistled by the home crowd at the Bernabeu for his perceived role in their recent downturn. Real Madrid’s best month since his arrival, by far, coincided with a spell on the sidelines.

You’d think that, given that context, Mbappe might quietly sit this one out. Keep schtum; not his year. His time will come.

But apparently not. And you don’t need to read too far between the lines to understand his logic.

“I really want the Ballon d’Or to return to Real Madrid,” he told Spanish outlet Diario AS.

“It needs to come back to the Bernabeu, to the Madridistas, to return for all those people and give them something to be excited about. They deserve it more than anyone.”

A few months ago, those very same fans were booing you, mate. Your time at the club has coincided with their biggest fallow period in a generation.

You can see the Cristiano Ronaldo influence, can’t you? There’s a certain self-belief — bordering on entitlement — that comes with being Real Madrid’s poster boy, the shiniest bauble on Florentino Perez’s lavishly decorated tree.

In one of the seemingly daily interviews that Mbappe has given in recent weeks, inevitably amplified by Fabrizio Romano and a thousand other social media aggregator accounts, he called himself “the chosen one” in comparison to his France team-mate and current holder Ousmane Dembele.

There’s no denying that Mbappe is one of the very best players of this era. That much was clear from the day he burst onto the scene at Monaco a decade ago. But it appears that ‘chosen one’ tag has gone to his head, and he’s tired of waiting around for a year when he actually deserves it.

His press tour is pure Kendall Roy ‘I’m the eldest boy’ desperation.

We didn’t think Mbappe could stoop much lower than cynically invoking his entirely genuine pride in his African heritage as part of what increasingly looks like a calculated, cynical appeal to voters across the continent. Doesn’t that same logic apply to Lamine Yamal and Morocco?

Yet here he is, giving his latest carefully stage-managed PR exercise, in a bubble bath, with a rubber ducky…

…Except, hang on. No, he hasn’t.

Despite the viral screengrabs and ‘snippets’ posted everywhere, Mbappe hasn’t given an interview to bottom-feeding YouTuber Jeremstar, whose whole schtick appears to be interviewing French reality TV C-Listers in the bath.

And therein lies the real punchline. Mbappe’s sustained PR campaign has been so shameless that you’d almost believe it. Before realising that his body has seemingly been superimposed onto one of the horrifying wide-shouldered live-action Goombas from the 1993 Super Mario movie. And that, really, the whole thing is obviously nonsense.

As if football discourse on Elon Musk’s X wasn’t sufficiently deranged enough, AI’s increasingly unavoidable presence feels like someone has thrown a grenade into the existing mountain of horsesh*t. You can picture where that analogy is going.

What was it Samuel Johnson said? Killing the planet to make semi-believable AI slop about a Real Madrid superstar’s barefaced Ballon d’Or campaign is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Something like that, anyway.

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