reported Sport newspaper that Mbappé has scored 13 goals in La Liga. Yet he shares top spot with Everton's Tierno Barry on the list of players who have squandered the most big chances across Europe's five major leagues, with 16 apiece.
Across all club competitions, Mbappé sits second among goalscorers in Europe's five major leagues with 17 goals, bettered only by Raphinha.
He also tops the list of squandered chances in La Liga, with a tally of 16.
The gap to the rest looks enormous. Real Sociedad's Orri Óskarsson comes next behind Mbappé, having wasted 9 big chances.
Barcelona's Karim Adeyemi takes third in La Liga with 8 squandered chances, while Raphinha, Lamine Yamal and Villarreal's Ayoze Pérez are level on 7 each.
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That leaves the Real Madrid man 7 chances clear of the next player on the list, a margin that demands we look beyond his goal return.
The European picture puts Mbappé alongside Everton's Tierno Barry on 16 squandered chances apiece, while Roma's Donyell Malen tops the Serie A list with 15.
France and Germany tell a different story, with a wider gap. Nice's Elye Wahi has squandered 9 big chances in Ligue 1, while Stuttgart's Ermedin Demirović, Borussia Dortmund's Serhou Guirassy and Bayern Munich's Harry Kane have each wasted 8 in the Bundesliga.
A tendency ongoing since his days with Paris Saint-Germain
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 scoring charts with 31 goals and top of the list of players who squandered the most big chances.
According to FotMob, Mbappé wasted 29 big chances, against 23 for Robert Lewandowski and 20 each for Alexander Sørloth and Raphinha.
Already in his first La Liga season, then, he proved that exceptional goalscoring can sit alongside a mountain of wasted chances.
Last season, the Frenchman topped the stat again, squandering 21 big chances in La Liga in 2025-2026, ahead of Ferran Torres on 20 and Georges Mikautadze and Vedat Muriqi on 19 apiece.
So the 16 chances he has wasted at the start of this season extend a trend that shadowed his first two years in a Real Madrid shirt. He now sits just 5 chances away from matching the total FotMob credits him with in La Liga last season.
The phenomenon stretches back to his time at Paris Saint-Germain, too. He topped the same list in Ligue 1 in 2022-2023, squandering 28 big chances, two clear of Folarin Balogun.
The comparison with Raphinha
Opta, the sports data and statistics company, defines big chances as situations that give a player a particularly favourable opportunity to score, such as certain one-on-ones with the goalkeeper or close-range shots free of significant defensive pressure.
Penalties fall into the same category. A big chance can end with a save, which is why the stat is not limited to shots that miss the target.
Reaching these situations in the first place is itself part of what makes Mbappé so valuable up front.
FotMob's expected goals table in La Liga reveals another paradox when you set Mbappé against Raphinha.
Mbappé has scored 13 goals from 14.6 expected goals, a shortfall of 1.6. Raphinha, by contrast, has scored 15 from 11.2 expected goals, beating his rate by 3.8.
The Barcelona man has scored more despite working with fewer expected chances.
Expected goals estimate the probability of each shot becoming a goal, based on factors like distance from goal and the angle of the strike.
For all that, Real Madrid have a goalscorer capable of finding the net across 7 games running, as his recent form proves.
But the sheer volume of chances he gets leaves room to demand more. Even scoring almost by habit, he wastes enough to share the top of a stat no forward wants to head, especially inside a team that manufactures so many openings.
