I published an op-ed in Les Echos (in French), in its Le Cercle section, on the Mbappé affair and what it reveals about European football’s exposure to Beijing’s decisions.

Twenty-four hours to lose everything

Kylian Mbappé lost three Chinese sponsors in twenty-four hours, for laughing on the French show The Bridge at a meme pasting his face onto Mao Zedong’s body. On 27 October, Dongpeng, Mengniu and Milkground terminated “with immediate effect”, in near-identical statements invoking “national sentiment”. He had courted that market: on Xiaohongshu since April 2024, with around a million followers, as many as on Weibo.

The bill quickly went beyond the player. State broadcaster CMG pulled Spain’s La Liga entirely. Dongpeng’s announcement was viewed 430 million times on Weibo. Dior and Hublot removed content featuring him. La Liga apologised, then Real Madrid. The apologies bought nothing: on 28 October, China’s foreign ministry spokesman took them “seriously” without lifting a single measure, and CCTV warned they would be judged by deeds.

Correlated revenue, not diversified revenue

Beijing has a term for this machinery: huayuquan, “discourse power” — an objective the scholar Hung-Jen Wang dates to 2011 in China: An International Journal. The sanction targets one player, but it addresses every brand.

For an investor, the affair says what football’s Chinese revenue really is: correlated. State broadcaster, domestic brands and social platforms all reacted on the same day to the same signal. A contract can be extinguished in a day, by political decision, over something unrelated to sport. The precedent dates from 2019: after a Houston Rockets executive backed Hong Kong protesters, CCTV dropped the NBA for months, and its commissioner acknowledged “substantial” losses. Seven years on, La Liga still answers with apologies, after the fact.

Writing the risk into contracts

The risk can be handled before the crisis. Morality clauses, now near-universal in sport, are drafted broadly and applied very subjectively — as legal scholars Patricia Sánchez Abril and Nicholas Greene showed in the Washington and Lee Law Review in 2017, proposing that a nexus be required between the conduct complained of and the brand’s commercial interest. An opinion about Mao has no connection to a sports drink.

I draw three levers from it: player unions can carve such opinions out of morality clauses or secure a termination indemnity; leagues can write that a suspension on non-sporting grounds does not interrupt broadcasters’ payments, backed by a bank guarantee or payment in advance per season; and a club should apply a political-risk discount to Chinese revenue, as an investor does for a concession in an unstable country. A Chinese broadcaster may refuse — and that refusal will then carry a price, known at signature rather than in the middle of the crisis.

A league that apologises at every crisis hands Beijing a free say over its players. It may as well charge for it.

→ Read the op-ed on Les Echos

On the same affair, seen from Taiwan: my editorial in the Taipei Times, 1 November 2026.