On the eve of the Real Madrid-Inter, the highly anticipated match of the first week of the Champions League league stage, Kylian Mbappé also spoke at the press conference, along with coach José Mourinho. The conversation with the journalists also had a special moment, when the French striker, with a quick gesture, hid from view a bottle of Gatorade that was clearly placed in front of him on the table.
Mbappé did this twice, after a hand placed another bottle in the same position after the former PSG player's first "departure".
Mbappe's gesture: Gatorade off the table.
The gesture immediately brought to mind a similar action made by Cristiano Ronaldo five years ago, before the Portugal-Hungary match at the European Championship. As soon as he sat down next to his coach, the Portuguese forward removed two bottles of Coca-Cola, the official sponsor of the tournament, from the table and replaced them with a bottle filled with water. “Water! This is what you should drink… water!” added Ronaldo, whose obsessive attention to nutrition – and avoidance of carbonated and sugary drinks – has long been known.
Mbappé was limited to the gesture and, in his case, there was no preaching about a healthy lifestyle. The explanation for the behavior of the 27-year-old Frenchman is more of a commercial nature. Kylian has always had an iron-clad policy for protecting his image: he refuses to be an advertising image – not even a passive advertising “background” – for brands that sponsor competitions but do not have a direct sponsorship contract with him.
This is precisely the case of Gatorade, owned by PepsiCo, which has been the official partner of the UEFA Champions League for years and for this reason its bottles inevitably end up on press conference tables.
There is also a precedent that caused a lot of fuss: in 2022, Mbappé was absent from France's photo shoots with Coca-Cola, KFC and Betclic, as he did not want to be used by the sponsors of the French national team, who were not his sponsors. An absence that contradicted the agreement with "Les Bleus", which obliges each player to participate in marketing campaigns with the national team's partners, in exchange for 25 thousand euros per match.
The reason made public at the time by Mbappe's circle was that not all brands matched his values and that, moreover, the income generated by these contracts was not reinvested sufficiently in grassroots football.
Why did he do it and what is the risk?
This time there is another element that made Mbappe's reaction of disgust towards Gatorade "automatic": the Real Madrid striker has a contract with a rival sports drink brand Pepsi. It is not a matter of a deal in the Western market: since April of this year, Kylian has been sponsoring "Bushuila", a popular sports and electrolyte drink produced by Dongpeng Beverage, a Chinese giant in this sector.
Putting Gatorade in the foreground in front of him during the Champions League conference would mean giving a competitor free advertising, also linking it to his image. Kylian decided not to allow this. Formally, Mbappé would not be able to behave in this way, since UEFA's commercial guidelines require the presence of official sponsor products on the conference tables and their removal constitutes an infringement that could lead to financial sanctions against the club.
In practice, however, he does so by taking a calculated risk: the potential fine against the club is negligible compared to the very high penalties and damage to the image that the athlete would risk if he violated the exclusivity clauses of his lucrative personal sponsorship contracts.
