Kylian Mbappé Reflects on Missed Penalty and VAR Chaos

Kylian Mbappé stood in front of the microphones and refused to hide.

The missed penalty, the confusion, the long wait, the eventual failure from the spot – all of it, he put on himself.

“I didn’t shoot well,” he said, speaking to RMC Sport. No excuses. No attempt to pin it on the chaos that unfolded around him, even if that chaos would have rattled almost anyone.

What followed was a glimpse into the modern penalty-taker’s nightmare.

Mbappé walked through the sequence in detail. The referee, he explained, initially confirmed the decision. “The referee tells me there’s a penalty. So I ask him if the VAR check is complete, and he says yes.” At that point, the routine begins: the mental reset, the focus, the familiar choreography from spot to net.

They switch to Ousmane Dembélé, who hands him the ball. Mbappé locks in, preparing for the kick.

Then everything unravels.

“Then he comes to me, when I’m already focused, to tell me there’s no penalty,” Mbappé said. The striker suddenly found himself in limbo. “So I don’t know, I pick up the ball, put it down again, thinking there’s a penalty, and he tells me, ‘No, wait, there’s an action two minutes earlier that needs to be checked’.”

The stop-start sequence dragged on, the rhythm gone, the clarity shattered by a process that is supposed to bring certainty. Time stretched. Players milled around. The crowd waited. Mbappé stayed there with the ball, his mind forced to reset, then reset again.

When the moment finally came, the shot was poor. He knew it. He said it. And he refused to hide behind the disruption.

“But that’s how it is, I let myself get distracted,” he admitted. A brutally honest line from a forward who has built a career on cold precision in high-pressure moments.

Mbappé spoke about how much work goes into that mental side of the game. Penalties are rehearsed in the head as much as on the training pitch: breathing, focus, routine, isolation from everything around. Yet even he had not prepared for this kind of scenario – being told yes, then no, then maybe, all with the ball in his hands.

“I’ve certainly gone through a lot of scenarios about how to concentrate on a penalty, but I hadn’t considered this particular scenario yet,” he said.

That is where his reflection cut deeper, moving beyond one miss to the wider reality of elite football in the VAR era. Decisions no longer feel instantaneous. They arrive in fragments, after checks, re-checks, and conversations only partially visible to players and fans.

“It’s a scenario we’ll have to consider,” Mbappé continued. “Because the referee can tell you there’s a penalty, but then two minutes later he can tell you there isn’t. I don’t know how long it lasted. It’s part of the new football. It’s the new football with VAR, you have to adapt.”

There was no rant against officials, no attack on the technology. Just a clear-eyed acknowledgment that the game has changed, and that even the sharpest finishers must now train for the psychological turbulence that comes with it.

The margins at the top level are thin enough. Now, even the wait for a whistle has become part of the battle.