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Ryan O’Hanlon
Sunday’s Clasico between Barcelona and Real Madrid could be decided by any number of different factors.
There might be a red card. A ball could hit the post for Barcelona and bounce out; a ball could hit the post for Real Madrid and bounce in. Barca’s high-press under Hansi Flick could overwhelm a Madrid side that couldn’t handle it last season. Or Barca’s high-press could fall apart the way it did against Sevilla a few weeks ago.
Perhaps Madrid’s more controlled tactics under Xabi Alonso will frustrate the chaos Barcelona typically likes to create. Or maybe a slow and methodical approach just won’t work in such an emotionally charged environment. It certainly didn’t in the Madrid derby. Maybe Trent Alexander-Arnold comes back from injury, and it saves Real Madrid. Maybe Alexander-Arnold comes back from injury and it saves Barcelona.
Soccer is a complex, dynamic and ever-changing game where everything is connected and interdependencies determine every outcome. That is true, but also: Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal are playing in this game.
We’ve waited seven years, but El Clasico sure seems as if it has its new version of Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi. Neither player is as good as those two — yet — but they’re two superstars who symbolize the current era of their clubs.
In Mbappé, we have the established superstar who did what so many top players seem to be doing now: ran down his contract and signed for Real Madrid as a free agent. And in Yamal, we have a teenage, right-footed left winger from La Masia whose emergence helped save a Barcelona club that was being run into the ground. It’s only October, but these two players are already the two favorites to win next year’s Ballon d’Or award, which is given to the best soccer player on the planet.
So, in the interest of not complicating things, let’s just ask a simple question ahead of El Clasico on Sunday. For the rest of this season, who would you rather have: Mbappé or Yamal?
• Watch: El Clasico, Sunday, Oct. 26 — live on ESPN+ or on ESPN2
• Read: Clásico head-to-head, form, key clashes, predictions, odds
• Read: Are set pieces ruining the Premier League?
Mbappé vs. Yamal: Scoring
This should be the shortest section.
Since the start of last season, Mbappé has scored 32 non-penalty goals in LaLiga, and Yamal has 10. This is why all the outrage over Yamal not winning the Ballon d’Or last month was absurd. He’s an attacker — he scored nine non-penalty goals last season, and unlike Mbappé, he had to waste a lot of possessions to even get to nine.
Here’s a chart, comparing every LaLiga player’s shots to their non-penalty expected-goal total:
Think of it this way: If you’re above the line, you’re taking better shots than expected for your shot volume, and if you’re below it, you’re taking a lot of bad shots.
As you can see, Mbappé leads LaLiga in the number of attempts, and he’s second in expected goals, or xG, an advanced metric that shows if a player is finding good scoring chances. Yamal, meanwhile, has taken the second-most shots, but he’s not even close to generating the second-most xG. That means he’s attempting a lot of terrible shots.
Check out Yamal’s shot map — the larger the circle, the higher the xG of the shot:
On top of that, Yamal still hasn’t proved himself to be a great finisher, or even above average. Since last season, he has converted 10.8 expected goals into 10 actual goals. Mbappé, meanwhile, is one of the best finishers in the world. Per FBref, he has exceeded his xG total by at least 2.0 goals in each of the past seven seasons.
Yamal, then, has a long way to go before he’s even close to being considered one of the best goal scorers in the world. Mbappé is already one of the best we’ve ever seen.
Edge: Mbappé
Mbappé vs. Yamal: Creating
This one, too, seems obvious.
Yamal has 17 assists since the start of last season — the most in LaLiga. Mbappé has five assists since the start of last season — tied for fifth most on his own team with Lucas Vázquez, who currently plays for Bayer Leverkusen.
But the gap isn’t quite as big once we start to ignore what their teammates did after they passed the ball. Expected assists, or xA, quantifies the likelihood that any given pass is turned into a goal. By that metric, Yamal still leads LaLiga, but Mbappé vaults into the top 10.
From a pure passing perspective and by a more traditional definition of creativity, Yamal is much more dangerous than Mbappé. He’s constantly taking half-dangerous possessions and turning them into high-quality chances on goal for his teammates with his technical skill and his vision from the right half-space.
But Mbappé’s off-ball movement is so good and he’s able to constantly get on the ball in such dangerous areas that he’s able to make relatively simple passes leading to great opportunities for his teammates. But still, he’s not on Yamal’s level.
Edge: Yamal
Mbappé vs. Yamal: Buildup play
Consider this a catch-all for everything that happens in possession that doesn’t involve scoring a goal or playing a pass for your teammate to score a goal.
One way to look at this is by using Stats Perform’s expected possession value metric, or xPV, which essentially determines how much every on-ball action increases a team’s likelihood of scoring a goal. And by this number, it’s not even close. Yamal is behind only his teammate Pedri for open-play xPV created in LaLiga since the start of last season:
But Mbappé’s mere presence in the top 10 is unusual.
Most penalty-box-type players automatically grade poorly by xPV. Usually, they’re either finishing off possessions with a shot or passing the ball out of dangerous areas, which can sometimes lead to negatively graded plays. For example, Barcelona’s Robert Lewandowski, who finished second behind Mbappé last season with 27 goals, has added minus-1.97 goals worth of possession value since the start of last season.
Mbappé is involved in buildup play — in two ways. The first is through carrying the ball forward. Since the start of last season, Mbappé has carried the ball into the attacking third more often (124 times) than all but two other players in Europe’s Big Five top leagues: Fulham’s Alex Iwobi and Barcelona’s Pedri. Important note: They’re both midfielders.
If we look at “progressive carries,” which FBref defines as carries “that move the ball towards the opponent’s goal line at least 10 yards from its furthest point in the last six passes, or any carry into the penalty area,” then Mbappé ranks fourth — behind Manchester City’s Jérémy Doku, his teammate Real Madrid teammate Vinícius Júnior, and Yamal.
The second way Mbappé aids buildup is as an outlet. He’s constantly an option for a forward pass, which allows the team to move the ball forward in two ways: (1) by passing him the ball, and (2) by attracting defenders and opening up space for other players to pass or carry the ball.
This chart compares all LaLiga players by how many passes attempted and how many passes received increased their team’s chances of scoring by at least 5%:
While that edge in xPV is ultimately impossible to ignore in Yamal’s favor, both players are massive positives in helping their teams generate the capacity to score goals.
Edge: Yamal
Mbappé vs. Yamal: Defending
For this, we can turn to Gradient Sports and their grading system, which awards players with a neutral, positive or negative mark for almost everything they do on the field. They then normalize those grades after every match and plot them on a 0-to-100 scale.
Here’s how Yamal grades out from a defensive perspective:
He’s pretty much average across the board.
And for a player who does so much in attack, that’s quite rare, as you can see in Mbappé’s grades:
Among center forwards who have featured in at least 90 minutes so far this season in LaLiga, Mbappé ranks last in successful pressures with 23, per Gradient. And that’s not just per 90 minutes — no, that’s for every 30 minutes out of possession. So, it’s accounting for the fact that Real Madrid rank second in LaLiga this season with 63.4% of the ball.
Yamal, meanwhile, ranks middle of the pack for wingers in pressures with 45. Now, you could try to argue that, of course Yamal is going to have more pressure because he plays for Barcelona and they’re the most aggressive pressing team in the world. But that’s sort of the point. When you have Yamal on your team, you can press like that. If you have Mbappé, then you can’t.
Edge: Yamal
Mbappé vs. Yamal: Final verdict
In directly comparing the two players, the decision comes down to this — what’s a bigger negative: Mbappé’s lack of defensive effort or Yamal’s lack of goals and constant waste of possessions?
Back in 2009, Michael Lewis wrote a profile of then-Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier for The New York Times Magazine, titled “The No-Stats All-Star.” The premise of the piece is that Battier did nothing that was rewarded by traditional stats or anything that was obviously excellent to the naked eye, but somehow his teams always played better when he was on the court.
In the piece, Lewis wrote about an inherent tension that exists in basketball but not in baseball or American football: “It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.”
Or, as he later put it: “It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.”
2:09
How Mbappé bounced back from ‘rock bottom’ to claim top spot on the FC 100
Alex Kirkland and Julien Laurens discuss Kylian Mbappé’s No. 1 ranking among center forwards on the ESPN FC 100.
Perhaps “selfish” isn’t the right word here, but the one valid criticism of both Mbappé’s and Yamal’s games is that they each do things that increase their own chances of scoring goals but don’t necessarily increase their own team’s chances of winning.
While yes, you do miss every shot you don’t take, each time Yamal attempts a shot from long range, he’s preventing both himself and all of his talented teammates from creating a better opportunity. That’s made worse by the fact that he still hasn’t proved himself to be particularly adept at scoring these long-range shots.
And by not pressuring the ball or exerting much effort while his team is out of possession, Mbappé is saving his energy for when Madrid attacks. That, almost definitely, increases how many goals he’s likely to score. But it also makes it harder for Madrid to defend and to attack — it’s easier for the opposition to advance the ball forward and it decreases the likelihood that Madrid creates a high turnover and the high-quality chances that come from those. This is why, back in April, I wrote an article with the headline: “How Kylian Mbappé made Real Madrid worse.”
But consider that we also saw Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah just have the best season of his career in his first year under new manager, Arne Slot. Why did that happen? “The tactics are quite different,” Salah said. “But I told him, ‘As long as you rest me defensively, I will provide offensively.’ So I’m glad I did. It was the manager’s idea of course, but he listens a lot.”
Mbappé is essentially a right-footed Salah: a winger who still manages to live inside the penalty area. These are the players who win you titles. And so, it’d be fair to put the decline in Madrid last season as much on a poorly built team under former manager Carlo Ancelotti as Mbappé. With the right players around him, Mbappé can easily score 25 non-penalty goals, add 10 assists, and do it all for a team that’s balanced and defensively sound.
With Yamal, he’s still never even scored double-digit goals in a season. He’s more fun to watch than anyone in the world right now. There’s a loping, hunched-over elasticity to his game that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen — he looks like a bruising running back and balletic small forward at the same time. It’s kind of like if Lionel Messi had Steven Gerrard’s body.
But ultimately goals win games. And until Yamal starts scoring more goals and taking better shots, the final edge belongs to Mbappé.
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