Player Comparison: Erling Haaland vs Kylian Mbappé

The two who were meant to take over.

In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi to Anakin Skywalker “it was supposed to be you, you were the chosen one two”. I’m paraphrasing a little, but after the hegemony of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, we were all led to believe that the next two players to dominate world football were ready and waiting. That there’d be just two players winning the Ballon d’Or for the next decade plus.

As of yet, neither has a Ballon d’Or despite reaching the ripe old ages of 26 and 27.

The script was written. Messi and Cristiano would fade, slowly, like ageing rock bands still selling out stadiums, and the keys to football would be handed to Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland. One had already scored in a World Cup final as a teenager. The other looked like the Ivan Drago of football — engineered for devastation.

Early years

If you’ll allow me a little self indulgence here (I know, I know, never make the story about you), when visiting my France based sister in the summer of 2016, I happened to come across a France under 19s game – think it was the Euros. At this point Mbappé wasn’t the household name he is today, having scored just two senior goals for Monaco. I watched in disbelief as he looked a million times better than everyone else on the pitch. I made a note of the name with the intention of sending it to the scouts of West Ham. They never got back to me. It’s probably a bit how Ole Gunnar Solskjaer felt when he recommended Haaland to Man Utd. So early on, both players missed out on a huge move.

Anyway, back to the piece. Mbappé came through at Monaco, and by 18 had a Ligue Un title and a surprise run to the Champions League semi-final in 2017 – alongside Bernardo Silva, Fabinho, and Falcao (note to self – piece on great teams that get broken up + Ajax 2019). A year later he was a 2018 World Cup winner, scoring a goal in the final, with his path apparently cemented to greatness. PSG bought him for Monopoly money, kept him, paid him like a small nation, and spent seven years trying to turn him into a Ballon d’Or and European Cup winner. Neither happened and he moved to Real Madrid in 2024 – a year after trolling them (you’ll never guess what happened once he left PSG).

Haaland took a more scenic route: Bryne, Molde, Salzburg, then Dortmund. The son of a Premier League and International footballer, he consistently scored freely for every team he played for. When in 2022, Manchester City paid the fee, gave him Kevin De Bruyne to set him up, and ended up with a treble in 2022/23 as he also broke the Premier League scoring record with 36. Some say the achievement was slightly over shadowed by West Ham’s Europa Conference League win, but everything looked good.

Different paths. Same job advert: score more than everyone else, preferably when it matters.

But, you’re not here for a history lesson, you just want to know if they’re Big Game Players or Flat Track Bullies – the whole point of this site. And you’re probably reading because you like statistics……or you’re related to me and have been pestered into reading.

Either way, let’s start with a look at the last 5 completed league seasons to see how they’ve done and in particular against Top 6 opponents. Why league seasons? Well every team is ranked, so it’s easier to definitively rank the strength of the opponent. First up, Erling:

Five seasons on AverageOpposition

Five years, two different leagues each, and the headline numbers are weirdly similar:

• 0.86 goals per game (Haaland) vs 0.87 (Mbappé)
• 31 league goals vs the Top 6 each
• About one in five of those goals from the spot (19% vs 20%)

If you lined them up in a lab, you’d swear someone had copied the spreadsheet and changed the name.

The interesting stuff is in the rows though.

Haaland’s peak big-game season is 2022/23: 36 league goals, 10 of them against the Top 6. That’s the year City won the lot, and though there was some stat padding with 14 goals against Bottom 6 teams, he destroyed the top teams. Undoubted evidence of his big game credentials right there. He also chucked in 2 assists for good measure:

He wasn’t able to keep that form up though, as the Premier League defenders found out a few more ways to defend against him. His goals against the Top 6 teams then went down to around 5 a season on average. Still great, but not quite Hall of Fame levels.

Mbappé on the other hand had his best performance against Top 6 teams in his last season with PSG (2023/24) – where he hit 9 goals (2 pens) plus 2 assists. Aside from that, he hit 4, 7, 5 and 6. Stat padding? Well he hit 12, 12, and 13 goals against the Bottom 6 teams in 21/22, 22/23 and 24/25.

His first season at Real Madrid:

Second season at Real Madrid saw an improvement but his overall haul of 25 league goals included 8 penalties:

What else? Well I was really surprised to see that he had 17 assists in 2021/22 – though only 2 of those were against Top 6 teams. His assists dropped quite significantly to 5, 7, 3, 5 in the following seasons.

From the spot

Over five seasons they’re level. Zoom in, they’re not.

Haaland’s penalty share has fallen: 6, 7, 7, then 3 and 3. City still take them; he just isn’t living off them.

Mbappé’s has gone the other way in Spain: 7 of 31 in 24/25, 8 of 25 in 25/26. That’s 15 penalties in 56 Madrid league goals — 27%. Still a lot of open-play finishing.

Take the penalties off and the five-year league totals are 108 (Haaland) and 113 (Mbappé). Still a coin flip. The “he only scores pens” shout doesn’t survive contact with either of them. The “Madrid Mbappé likes a penalty” shout, unfortunately for him, does.

The games the league table doesn’t see

Champions League

League bands are the point of this site. They’re not the whole player.

Haaland has the Champions League medal (2023), though no goal in that final – in fact the latest round he scored in was a Quarter Final vs Bayern. If you dig a little deeper, the season after when they were knocked out by Real Madrid, 4-4 on aggregate – he didn’t bother the scoresheet then either. He did score a year later against Real Madrid but City went out in the play off round. He scored against them again in 2025/26 – but again it was only in the Round of 16. In fact, he’s never scored past the Quarter Final with either Dortmund or City. For such a prolific striker, that’s not what you’d expect.

Mbappé’s record is slightly better – whilst still no medal, he has at least scored in the Semi-Final – during Monaco’s stellar 2016/17 season. Since then he’s added Quarter Final goals in 3 other seasons. In fact the list of teams he’s scored against in the knock outs is decent too – including Barcelona (6 including a hat trick), Real Madrid (2), Man City (6 – including a hat trick), Bayern Munich (4), Dortmund (3), Juve, and Man Utd. A very decent indicator of big game prowess. But…..he played in the 2020 Final vs Bayern as PSG failed to score.

World Cup

Mbappé has scored in two World Cup finals. 2018 as a 19-year-old, trophy in the cabinet. 2022 a hat-trick (including 2 pens – high pressure ones) in the final and still on the losing side, which might be the most Mbappé sentence ever written: historic, cinematic, and somehow not quite the ending he wanted. Golden Boot in that tournament.

Whilst Mbappé is now the all time World Cup top scorer (an indication of being a big game player surely), Haaland has only been to one World Cup. A double in the Round of 16 against Brazil points to a Big Game Player, but in the Quarter Finals against England, he was strangely subdued.

Where Haaland may have just about edged it in League performances, Mbappé has blown him away in the Champions League and the World Cup.

What else?

Well it doesn’t point to the Big Game Player data but the case of Mbappé and PSG is curious. Bought to win them the Champions League and become the best player in the world, as soon as he left, two things happened:

1. PSG won back to back Champions League titles with his old team mate Dembélé also winning the Ballon d’Or
2. Real Madrid won no major trophies in the two seasons since he joined them

Does that point to something? Not for me to say.

It is only fair to say as well – Mbappé isn’t an out and out number 9 like Haaland. He prefers drifting in from the left. But the stats are similar enough for us to compare.

Finals

This one shocked me. Haaland’s record in Finals:

Versus Mbappé’s:

There’s a clear winner here. Mbappé has 7 goals and 2 assists in finals, to Haaland’s 2 goals – both of which were scored in the same game.

In a previous Player Comparison piece – Henry vs van Nistelrooy, we saw that Henry had a similarly poor record in Finals. And perhaps it’s these big moments missing from each player that has led to them missing out on the Ballon d’Or.

For Mbappé – having never won the Champions League has been the millstone round his neck.

So who is the bigger game player?

Well based on the league performance, it was just about veering towards Haaland – Mbappé seemed to do it more against the poorer teams, but in all truth, there wasn’t much in it.

Then came the Champions League stats – Haaland only scoring in one Quarter Final is a poor return for someone so prolific. Compare that to Mbappé’s goals in several Quarter Finals and at least one Semi Final and it’s a clear win for the Frenchman.

The World Cup heroics clinched it for Mbappé – scoring in two finals is undoubtedly showing a big game mentality.

And then…..that last bombshell on Haaland’s Finals metrics meant that there is no way you can argue that Haaland is more of a big game player than Mbappé. I appreciate there’s more to winning matches than goal involvements – Haaland often occupies two to three defenders at once, but for someone so prolific to have such a poor record in Cup Finals certainly raises a few eyebrows.

Winner: Kylian Mbappé

The hunt for the Ballon d’Or continues.

And there happens to be a few new kids on the block. In fact Lamine Yamal being at Barcelona against Mbappé at Real Madrid does remind me of another rivalry……

You can also compare them on the site, season by season.