José Mourinho said Kylian Mbappé will play for Real Madrid against Villarreal on Saturday at 21.00 at the Santiago Bernabéu, and he dismissed the backlash around the forward as ridiculous. Mourinho also said Madrid had not let Mbappé down, only that the noise around him had grown for no good football reason.

Mbappé will play at the Bernabéu

Mourinho was explicit on selection. “This means that tomorrow Mbappé is going to play, and if he is going to play it is because I am sure that he has not let down Real Madrid or his obligations,” he said, quoted by Europa Press in comments translated from Spanish.

That lands on top of the numbers Mbappé is already producing. He has 7 league goals in 7 La Liga appearances, and his league rating is 7.98, which is a decent reminder that the on-field output has not dipped because of the off-field chatter.

Mourinho’s tone around the wider coverage was harsher. “Then we enter the field of looking for problems. The problems of football have not been enough for you,” he said, after insisting Mbappé had sought an external diagnosis that matched Madrid’s over his knee issue. He also said the stories around the player had been inflated, from the nightclub claim to the bicycle episode in Switzerland.

Madrid's week and Villarreal's approach

Madrid's squad news is better than the tone around the Mbappé story suggests. Mourinho said this is the first time in the last 10 years that Real Madrid reach mid-October without a single injured player, while naming Éder Militão, Rodrygo, Asencio and Mendy as the players still out from last season.

He added that the players had complied with their recovery plans during the international break. That does not make the build-up perfect, because he also said Madrid had been left with five players at one point, but it does leave them in a stronger position than many expected.

Villarreal arrive with a different mood. Iñigo Pérez said they want to press high, lose their fear and treat the Bernabéu as a place to show themselves. They are ninth in La Liga with 8 points from 7 matches, and their recent run is WWLLL, so the challenge is real enough even if the script around the game has been dominated by Mourinho and Mbappé.

Madrid are fourth with 15 points from 7 matches, and the pressure to handle the game properly is obvious. If Mbappé starts as Mourinho expects, the spotlight will move from the press room to the pitch very quickly on Saturday evening.

Written by Daniel Hartley with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 4 outlets. How we work →