The Mbappe affair and China should also serve as a warning to Bayern Munich: Be careful who you do business with!

The China vs Kylian Mbappe affair began with a question in a make-up room. Before a podcast recording began, Mbappe answered a few routine social media questions. One was: Which meme featuring your face made you laugh the most?

Mbappe isn't just a great striker. He's a walking meme. Since the start of his career at AS Monaco, the internet has made fun of his appearance and certain mannerisms.

People have put Mbappe's head on Ninja Turtle figures because he supposedly resembles Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His arms-crossed celebration circulates whenever someone manages the most mundane task, such as taking out the rubbish. Other memes feature his supposedly dirty laugh or what looks like a death stare.

Then there are the Mbappe dictator memes.

They play on how authoritarian he can sometimes seem on the pitch, bossing his team-mates around. Mbappe has grown up with the memes, knows them and has often laughed at them publicly.

So when someone asked him back in March 2026 which meme featuring his face made him laugh the most, he replied, laughing: "There are lots. The one I laughed at most was this video where my face was put on the body of, I think, a Chinese dictator. I use it a lot with my friends when we play PlayStation."

Kylian Mbappe was cancelled for laughing at himself

China's regime did not cancel Mbappe and Spain's La Liga because he called a Chinese dictator a dictator six months ago. That would have been bad enough. Mbappe sparked a mid-sized diplomatic crisis by laughing at himself. That makes the affair sadder and more revealing.

When Mbappe and Real Madrid now apologise to the Chinese people for the superstar's "ill-considered remarks", what exactly are they apologising for? Javier Tebas, president of the Spanish league, publicly reprimanded Mbappe and grovelled to the Chinese advertising partners. One wishes he had more brains and a backbone.

The affair tells us less about how authoritarian regimes handle irony and supposed criticism than it might seem. China's reaction to Mbappe's remarks may be excessive even by Chinese standards. But anyone genuinely surprised by it probably also believes Chinese internet censorship exists to protect young people.

The Mbappe affair is a lesson in outrage culture

Instead, the Mbappe affair shows how outrage culture spreads. What caused today's outrage has long since ceased to matter. All that counts is that someone has to explain themselves, someone has to apologise and everyone gets to be outraged.

Mbappe has lost advertising deals worth €6.5 million in this case, while the Spanish league risks losing up to €400 million. Meanwhile, China's leadership tells the Chinese people, without further context, that they have collectively been gravely insulted. Jokes about the great leader Mao Zedong, even supposed ones, are taboo. Yet all Mbappe did was laugh at a cruel joke at his own expense.

That is what happens when you get into bed with the wrong people

Making Mbappe apologise for this is grotesque. Real and, above all, Tebas are shameful for going along with it. Rather than consider what caused the outrage and how to calm the other side as it escalates, they bow to an authoritarian regime.

But that is what happens when you keep getting into bed with the wrong people. Anyone who does business with authoritarian regimes and continually lets those regimes use them for their own purposes pays a price. That is as true in football as it is in politics.

Clubs such as Bayern Munich should take note. The German record champions may have allowed their partnership with Qatar and, later, their sponsorship deal with Rwanda to expire after fan protests. Yet those in charge gave little impression that they understood why fans had protested in the first place.

Anyone who readily accepts money from such partnerships needs to know that, sooner or later, it will no longer be just about sponsorship. It will be about which images may be published and which statements may not be made.

In this country, intellectual lightweights, especially on the right, often invoke the term cancel culture whenever someone challenges their simplistic outpourings. Here is what cancel culture can actually mean: Real Madrid and La Liga are abandoning their most important player and yielding to pressure from an authoritarian regime.

Enablers of China's propaganda

Real have done it before. Back in August 2026, they deleted a social media post mourning the victims of the devastating floods in Nepal and Tibet, without any further explanation. The post had drawn attention to people's suffering after a natural disaster.

Yet China's leadership apparently detected a political statement even there. China does not recognise Tibet, and the regime cancels the entire region as far as it can. Any club that behaves as Real Madrid have, and Real are not alone, goes from business partner to enabler of its propaganda.