Mbappe’s girlfriend is trending and his goals aren’t — we have a problem

So I was doing what I do — falling down a Google rabbit hole at an unreasonable hour — and I noticed something that genuinely stopped me mid-scroll.

Kylian Mbappe. One of the fastest, most electric players on the planet. A guy who has basically been carrying France on his back. And the thing people are searching for most? His girlfriend. Not his hat trick. Not his sprint speed. Not whether he’s going to win the whole thing. His. Girlfriend.

I don’t know — maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am still annoyed. And I think you should be too.

Why is “Mbappe’s girlfriend” outranking his actual performance?

Search trends don’t lie, and right now they’re telling a pretty unflattering story. When a generational talent is in the middle of a World Cup campaign and the top autocomplete attached to his name is about who he’s dating, that’s not just curious internet behavior — that’s a symptom of something bigger.

Sports media has always had a soft spot for the “who’s behind the great man” narrative. It sells. It’s easy. It requires zero understanding of the offside rule.

But it also consistently redirects attention away from women — because the girlfriend in question isn’t just a search result, she’s a real person whose entire public existence just got reduced to a footnote in someone else’s Wikipedia page.

What does this actually do to the women involved?

Think about what it’s like to have your name go viral for no reason you chose. She didn’t score a goal. She didn’t give an interview. She just exists in proximity to someone famous, and now her face is everywhere and the discourse around her ranges from obsessive to genuinely gross.

This happens every single tournament. Every. Single. One. WAGs coverage during the World Cup has been a media staple for decades — The Guardian has written about it, other outlets have written about it, and yet here we are in 2024 still doing the exact same thing.

The women get scrutinized, ranked, discussed like set dressing. And the moment any of them have an opinion or, god forbid, their own career, that becomes the weird angle instead of the baseline.

Isn’t this just what people want to search for?

This is the argument I’ve seen made, and I want to steel-man it for a second because it’s not entirely wrong. Yes, celebrity relationships are fascinating to people. Yes, the intersection of sports and pop culture drives massive engagement. And no, curiosity about an athlete’s personal life isn’t inherently malicious.

But here’s where I still disagree — what people search for is shaped by what media surfaces and amplifies. If every outlet runs a “who is Mbappe’s girlfriend” explainer within 24 hours of the tournament starting, of course that’s what trends. We’re not just reflecting demand, we’re manufacturing it.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report has tracked for years how editorial choices upstream shape what audiences think they want. Clicks follow coverage. Coverage follows editorial priorities. And those priorities have historically not been kind to women.

The double standard nobody wants to talk about

Here’s the thing that really gets me. When female athletes compete at the highest level — Serena Williams, Alex Morgan, Caitlin Clark — the conversation almost immediately pivots to their appearance, their relationships, whether they’re likable enough.

Mbappe plays a bad game and the analysis is tactical — formation, fatigue, defensive pressure. A female athlete plays a bad game and suddenly we’re talking about what she said in an interview three years ago and whether her attitude is a problem.

It makes sense because the framework was never neutral to begin with. Sports media was built by and for a specific audience, and expanding that audience has always been treated as optional rather than essential.

In my piece on raising strong girls and what we’re actually teaching them, I talked about how the messages we send aren’t always the ones we intend. This is the same thing, just on a global stage.

Does anyone actually cover women’s sports this way?

Yes — and that’s what makes the contrast so stark. Women’s sports coverage, when it exists at all, tends to over-index on personal narratives, relationships, and likeability in a way that men’s coverage simply doesn’t.

Male athletes get their stats broken down. Female athletes get their “journey” dissected. Male athletes get debates about legacy. Female athletes get debates about whether they smiled enough at the press conference.

And the women who are dating high-profile male athletes? They get the worst of both worlds — the scrutiny of being a public figure with none of the credit of being one.

What would actually better coverage look like?

Not complicated. If Mbappe’s girlfriend is a public figure in her own right — cover her for that. If she’s not — leave her out of it entirely.

And when we’re covering a World Cup, maybe the SEO priority should be the goals, the tactics, the moments that will actually matter in ten years.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I wrote about the way we frame women’s ambition and strength — because the through line is the same. We keep treating women as context for men’s stories instead of the main event of their own.

That’s the shift. It’s not hard to understand. It’s just apparently hard to execute.

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None of this means people are bad for being curious about celebrity relationships. That’s human. What it means is that the machine built around that curiosity has real consequences for real women who never asked to be part of the story.

Mbappe is extraordinary at football. That’s the story. The rest of it — the searches, the explainers, the sidebar gossip — it’s filler dressed up as content.

We can do better than filler. It makes sense because we know what actual good sports coverage looks like. We’ve just been choosing not to prioritize it.

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