Kylian Mbappé spoke to the media after Real Madrid's 2-0 win at Oviedo and said he had been used as a substitute against Oviedo, adding bluntly: "El míster me dijo que soy el cuarto delantero."
Mbappé followed that with a second, wider point about his place in the squad: "No, ninguno, pero hay que aceptar la idea del entrenador. Tengo que trabajar para ser mejor que Vini, Mastantuono y Gonzalo..." The remarks came after a match in which he was not in the starting eleven and raised fresh questions about his standing inside the team.
Álvaro Arbeloa replied the same day, rejecting Mbappé's phrasing in a short, pointed exchange: "Yo no le dije esa frase, ya me gustaría tener cuatro delanteros, no me habrá entendido bien..." He added more of an assessment of the player's seasonal form — "Me parecería bien que pensase eso, seguramente él ha metido muchos más goles en la primera parte de la temporada que en la segunda" — and finished the sequence of remarks with a line that underlined who is making selection decisions: "Mientras me siente en esta silla, decido yo. Si no les parece bien, que esperen al siguiente." Those answers were delivered in a press conference in which Arbeloa also mentioned the players' "gran ego" and referred to Mbappé's absence from the Barcelona match.
The timing sharpens the exchange. The article says Mbappé was not in the final call-up for the Barcelona match and that, three days earlier, he left Saturday's training in the final minutes alleging discomfort and later did not appear in the squad; four days before that, he had not even been able to be on the bench, according to Arbeloa. The public comments from both men landed against that short, congested timeline and after a Bernabéu match where the dispute intensified.
There is also a recent pattern and a short history behind these two lines of fire. The article places the current dispute in a longer string of disagreements involving Mbappé and figures around him: confrontations tied to substitutions have cropped up before, including incidents in December 2019 and February 2020 when changes in the 90th and 70th minutes respectively provoked visible anger. The article also notes a prior clash at the RCDE Stadium, after a 0-2 win over Espanyol, when Arbeloa held a press conference that increased tensions. Observers point to a backdrop that includes a controversial trip to Italy — Mbappé arrived by private plane in Madrid from that trip while still injured — and the wider context of arguments over form and selection that have followed him since earlier moments in his career.
The contradiction at the centre of this story is simple and consequential: Mbappé says Arbeloa told him he is the "fourth forward"; Arbeloa says he never said it, then doubled down publicly on his authority and on the idea that some players carry a large ego. That gap is not merely a semantic dispute. Arbeloa's press conference linked selection to discipline and availability, and the sequence of absences and training exits has already produced real selection outcomes — most notably the omission from the Barcelona match.
For now the scoreline is small — a 2-0 win at Oviedo — but the fallout is outsized. Arbeloa's line, "Mientras me siente en esta silla, decido yo," is a clear statement that selection will be handled publicly and without private hedging; Mbappé's public claim about being the "fourth forward" is an equally public challenge to that posture. The single most consequential question now is whether Arbeloa's insistence on visible control will mean continued exclusions from matchday squads — beginning with Barcelona, where Mbappé was already omitted — or whether the player will recalibrate his approach and restore a working relationship behind the scenes.
