There is a very specific kind of petition that has nothing to do with what it says it is about. It starts with a grievance that is real — a striker who didn’t lift a trophy, a season that fell short, a hundred million euros worth of expectation that came back empty. I watched this one grow for days before I could name what it was becoming. By the time 33 million signatures had attached themselves to the “Mbappe Out” petition, the document had stopped being about Kylian Mbappe’s hamstring or his goals-per-game ratio at Real Madrid. It had become, instead, a warrant. What metastasized in those comment sections wasn’t football anger. It was a crowd that had found a woman to discipline, using football as the excuse.
Ester Expósito is a 26-year-old Spanish actress: 24 million Instagram followers, globally known from Netflix’s Elite, a Cannes regular. She went on a yacht vacation in Sardinia. She was photographed near Kylian Mbappe. That is the complete list of what she did. The mob that followed this information into her mentions, the people who disabled her Instagram comments with volume alone, the accounts sending her death threats in French. They were not responding to a foul. They were responding to her proximity to a famous man during a period when they had decided that man needed to suffer.
This is what the Ester Expósito Mbappe petition backlash reveals about the people behind it: the audience for this kind of performance is not primarily football fans. It is a constituency that requires a target with a face, a body, a presence that can be made responsible. Mbappe gave them his statement: “My only mistake has been not to help the team win titles.” They moved on from him quickly, because he answered back, because he has institutional protection, because he is the center of the story. Expósito had none of that scaffolding. She was adjacent, and adjacency, for women in famous men’s orbits, functions as culpability.
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Then came Bad Bunny’s concert at the Metropolitano Stadium on May 30th. Bad Bunny has a section called La Casita, a VIP onstage enclosure that became its own controversy when fans noticed it seemed to favor conventionally attractive celebrities over the general audience he markets himself to. Expósito was there. She danced briefly with him onstage. The video went viral immediately, and the Mbappe crowd, which had not actually dispersed, redirected. It was almost elegant in its efficiency: here was a woman who had already been designated a target, now appearing in a second context where a second crowd had already decided she was suspect.
The sociology of this is not complicated, even if its emotional logic is. The Mbappe petition was always partly nationalist — French fans performing outrage at a club that they believe stole their player’s best years, needing a body to perform through. The abstract (underperformance, wasted potential, tactical failures) is harder to punish. Expósito’s Instagram is not abstract. Her face is not abstract. The yacht photos are not abstract. She became the material form of a grievance that had no other available body. This is the same thing that happened to Lamine Yamal’s girlfriend during Spain’s run, the same mechanics that drove the Jordyn Woods scrutiny at the NBA Finals earlier this month. The sport becomes the alibi. The woman becomes the point.
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On June 3rd, at an event in Ibiza, Expósito said what she had seen clearly: “I think the problem lies in the way a very misogynistic part of society looks at and judges others, as well as in the people who use social media to hurt others.” It was precise and it was correct, and it will not change anything for the next woman who ends up photographed near the wrong athlete at the wrong moment.
https://x.com/AccessBadBunny/status/2062270255855030396
By June 10th, new photos had emerged — Mbappe and Expósito again, somewhere warm, just ahead of the World Cup. France plays Senegal on June 16th at MetLife Stadium. The petition, which now carries somewhere between 49 and 70 million signatures depending on who is counting, has no email verification requirement, which means a significant portion of those numbers are noise. Real Madrid has no plans to sell him. The club absorbed the whole spectacle with the institutional indifference of an organization that has processed wilder things.
What didn’t get absorbed was Expósito’s comment section, which remains closed. That’s the actual outcome of this particular episode of our World Cup coverage: not a transfer, not a policy, not accountability for a single substandard season. A woman’s ability to exist publicly on the internet, restricted. The petition was never really about football. Football was just the sentence the mob agreed to say out loud. The verdict had already been written somewhere else, in the part of the discourse that decides which women get to be in the frame.
