Mbappé tops a blacklist, with Barcelona star third

Kylian Mbappé, the Real Madrid star, leaves the same impression in every match he plays. He is capable of scoring a goal out of nothing, especially when he breaks from the left flank and shoots from outside the penalty area. Yet at the same time, he squanders many clear-cut chances.

Sport newspaper reported that Mbappé has scored 13 goals in La Liga. Yet he shares top spot with Everton's Thierno Barry on the list of players who have wasted the most big chances across Europe's top five leagues, with a tally of 16.

Across all competitions at club level, Mbappé sits second among the top scorers in Europe's big five leagues with 17 goals, bettered only by Raphinha.

In La Liga alone, he leads the way for wasted chances with that tally of 16.

The gap to the rest looks vast. Orri Óskarsson of Real Sociedad comes next with nine wasted big chances.

Karim Adeyemi, the Barcelona player, occupies third in La Liga with eight wasted chances, while Raphinha, Lamine Yamal and Villarreal's Ayoze Pérez are level on seven apiece.

That leaves the Real Madrid man seven chances clear of the player below him, a gap that invites a look beyond his goal tally.

Widen the lens to Europe and Mbappé stands alongside Barry on 16 wasted chances each, while Roma's Donyell Malen tops the Serie A list with 15.

France and Germany tell a different story. Elye Wahi of Nice wasted nine big chances in Ligue 1, while Stuttgart's Ermedin Demirović, Borussia Dortmund's Serhou Guirassy and Bayern Munich's Harry Kane each wasted eight in the Bundesliga.

This paradox has followed Mbappé since he joined Real Madrid. In the 2024-2025 La Liga season, when he won the Golden Boot, he finished top of the scorers' list with 31 goals and also topped the list of players who wasted the most big chances.

FotMob put Mbappé's wasted big chances at 29, compared to 23 for Robert Lewandowski and 20 apiece for Alexander Sørloth and Raphinha.

His first La Liga season proved that exceptional goal output can sit right alongside a mountain of squandered chances.

Last season, the Frenchman went back to the top of this list. He wasted 21 big chances in La Liga in 2025-2026, ahead of Ferran Torres on 20 and Georges Mikautadze and Vedat Muriqi on 19 each.

So the 16 chances he has wasted at the start of the current campaign extend a trend that has shadowed him through his first two seasons in the Real Madrid shirt. He now sits just five chances away from matching the FotMob total for his entire last La Liga season.

The phenomenon stretches back to his Paris Saint-Germain days too. He topped this list in Ligue 1 in 2022-2023 as well, wasting 28 big chances, two more than Folarin Balogun.

Opta, the sports data specialists, define big chances as situations that hand a player a particularly favourable opportunity to score, such as certain one-on-ones with the goalkeeper or close-range shots with no significant defensive pressure.

Penalties count too. A big chance can end with a save, so the statistic is not limited to shots dragged wide of the goal.

Reaching those situations in the first place is itself part of Mbappé's value as a forward.

FotMob's expected goals table in La Liga throws up another paradox when you set Mbappé against Raphinha.

Mbappé has scored 13 goals from 14.6 expected goals, a negative difference of 1.6. Raphinha, by contrast, has scored 15 from 11.2 expected goals, beating his rate by a margin of 3.8.

The Barcelona man has scored more goals from fewer expected chances.

Expected goals estimate the probability of each shot finding the net, based on factors such as distance from goal and the angle of the strike.

Real Madrid still have a scorer capable of finding the net in seven matches running, as his recent form has shown.

But the sheer volume of chances he gets leaves plenty of room to demand more. Even when he scores almost by habit, he wastes enough to share top spot in a statistic no forward wants to lead, especially inside a side that manufactures this many attacking opportunities.