Here, roughly, is how a celebrity endorsement works. A company that sells milk in China pays a famous athlete to stand next to the milk. Nobody at the company cares what he thinks about milk. It is renting his popularity, on the theory that some of the affection people feel for him will rub off on the product. That trade makes perfect sense for as long as people in the market actually feel that affection. The contract is a long position in one man’s reputation in one country. Like any long position it can go to zero quickly, and in some markets it can go below zero, which is when you want out.
This week Kylian Mbappé went below zero in China. As Jay Ganglani reported for Fortune, the Real Madrid striker appeared on a popular French online talk show and described a meme figure as “a Chinese dictator,” which was widely taken as a reference to Mao. The meme put Mbappé’s face on a picture of Mao Zedong. Asked which meme he found funniest, he picked that one and called the figure “some guy—I think he’s a Chinese dictator,” according to Time. The show, The Bridge, posted the clip on Monday. Time says it was behind-the-scenes footage from a podcast filmed in March, while Inside Sport puts the interview in April and says the clip took six months to reach Chinese social media. Either way it reached China, and the show has since taken it down and apologized.
Within days three Chinese sponsors had cut ties with him: Dongpeng, a beverage maker; Mengniu, the dairy giant; and Milkground, a cheese maker. Fortune says the companies didn’t specify what prompted their decisions. Time reports that they cited a “zero-tolerance policy” toward words or conduct that offend the feelings of the Chinese public, which is pretty specific about the motive while leaving out the words. China Media Group, the state broadcaster, said it would suspend broadcasts of LaLiga, Spain’s top league, along with other games involving Mbappé, and it pulled his ads. Dior, Rimowa, Nike, Hublot and On Running reportedly removed Mbappé content from Weibo, which is the quieter way of reaching the same conclusion.
The money is worth a look. Citing Le Monde, Time says the Dongpeng and Mengniu contracts were worth about 50 million yuan (€6.7 million) combined. Time also reports that both brands’ shares fell after his remarks. So the companies that had rented his reputation watched it land on their own share prices, which is the below-zero scenario in its purest form. Dropping him was the cheapest hedge on offer.
Then came the apologies. “My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurt many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world,” Mbappé wrote on X. “I apologize to everyone my words have upset. This was absolutely not my intention. I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history, and I am sincerely sorry.” The broadcaster’s reply, as Time tells it, was that it hoped he “will genuinely learn a lesson from this” and would “thoroughly correct” his mistake. Before the apology, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson had said on Tuesday that “words and deeds that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people will naturally be met with opposition.”
Why punish the whole league?
I think the broadcast decision is the interesting part. Sponsors firing Mbappé is just the endorsement market doing its job. China Media Group did something else. It didn’t stop at Mbappé; it took every LaLiga match off its air, including the many that have nothing to do with him. That’s collective punishment, and the incentives explain why it works. A player can probably survive losing three sponsors. A league that sells TV rights and chases foreign audiences has much more to lose, so it has every reason to make sure none of its players says anything like this again. If you want to discipline someone, you squeeze whoever has leverage over him.
The league got the message fast. LaLiga president Javier Tebas met China’s ambassador to Spain to “seek solutions that allow us to overcome this episode.” “Our commitment is to keep working together so that an individual episode does not harm the important advances achieved nor affect the millions of Chinese fans who follow our competitions,” he said. Real Madrid apologized on Wednesday: “Our club maintains a deep respect for China, its history, its culture and its citizens, as well as for the millions of Chinese fans who feel affection and admiration for Real Madrid.” Forbes notes that this is the club’s second dispute in China this season, after it deleted a social media post about Tibet in August.
There is a precedent, and LaLiga will not enjoy it. In 2019 Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted support for the Hong Kong protests. CCTV pulled NBA games off the air, and the blackout lasted until 2022. One tweet bought roughly three years of darkness.
It isn’t only politics, either. H&M stopped using Xinjiang cotton in early 2021 over concerns about alleged abuses against Uyghur Muslims, and a consumer boycott badly hurt its sales. In June 2026 Lululemon had to apologize after a promotional event on the Great Wall featured a Japanese taiko drum instead of a Chinese dagu. Users spotted the mistake, and the company deleted every image of the drum event. Louis Vuitton won a trademark case in June when a Chinese court ruled that milk tea chain Molly Tea’s four-petaled logo infringed its trademark and ordered Molly Tea to pay 10.3 million yuan ($1.5 million). Many people on Chinese social media called the ruling unfair and boycotted the brand. LVMH later said the controversy had weighed on its China sales, and revenue at its fashion and leather goods division fell 5% on an organic basis. Louis Vuitton won $1.5 million in court and then spent some unknown amount of goodwill on a market that was already getting harder for European luxury. Winning the lawsuit was apparently the easy part.
Chinese companies aren’t exempt. In 2024 the bottled-water brand Nongfu Spring faced a boycott after some social media users accused it of using Japanese-style imagery on its packaging, and some 7-Eleven stores stopped selling its products.
So every endorsement deal in China, whether it pays a footballer, sells a handbag or prints a label on a water bottle, is a bet that you’ll stay on the right side of a line nobody publishes in advance. Mbappé crossed it while picking his favorite meme. The Bridge has deleted the clip, which seems to be the only move in this whole affair that cost nothing.