Real Madrid v Man City: Kylian Mbappe injury threatens striker shoot-out with Erling Haaland

Prolific strikers will go head-to-head in Uefa Champions League, providing the Frenchman overcomes injury concerns

Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland of Manchester City. AFP; Getty Images

How enticing must the long Real Madrid medical bulletin look to Erling Haaland. It starts in defence and runs through many names.

Eder Militao, probably the first choice of the centre-backs, is out for months, thanks to the injury he sustained on Sunday. David Alaba, who has managed one full game this season, will be waiting for a while until he is fit enough for another.

There’s more. Dean Huijsen is on his way back to fitness but there would be risk rushing him into action for tonight’s hosting of Manchester City.

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Two right-backs, Dani Carvajal and Trent Alexander-Arnold, are unavailable. So is one left-back, Ferland Mendy, while the state-of-mind of another two, Fran Garcia and Alvaro Carreras can only be wondered at: Both were sent off in the weekend’s home defeat to Celta Vigo, part of a sequence of just two Madrid wins in seven games.

Kylian Mbappe, meanwhile, must look harder for optimistic signs in his preparation for Madrid against City.

There’s the absence of Rodri, and the fact that without their galvanising midfielder, this City team do leave gaps. Saturday’s 3-0 win over Sunderland marked a first clean sheet after a four-match rollercoaster in which 10 goals were conceded.

When it comes to duels between Haaland, 25, and Mbappe, 26, a pair of finishers for so long feted as the best in the world of their generation, prevailing conditions are a factor. But there’s always the idea that their individual excellence, the seizing of a moment, might bend a contest their way.

Which is why Madrid seemed so concerned on Tuesday that Mbappe, the leading scorer in the Champions League coming into match day six, should overcome the discomforts of a painful finger injury and a soreness in his left thigh to be as close to his best as possible at the Bernabeu.

Both strikers are in superb form, probably as sharp as they have been coming into any head-to-head of their developing rivalry. And it is a peculiar sort of rivalry in that while for well over half a decade they have been identified as probably the most coveted striker anywhere in their age group, they have actually shared a pitch very seldom.

A mere three times, in fact. By comparison with the joust Mbappe-Haaland was earmarked to succeed, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi had, at 24 and 22 respectively, already been on opposite sides in a final and a semi-final of the Champions League. Once they were both employed in La Liga, at Barcelona and Madrid, Ronaldo and Messi had faced each other nearly 20 times by the time they were at the ages Mbappe and Haaland are now.

More than five-and-a-half years have passed since the first Haaland-Mbappe duel, a last-16 Champions League tie between Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain.

Haaland scored twice for Dortmund in the Germany leg, one of his goals a thumping drive that remains prominent in any highlights show reel of his vast haul of career goals. But in Paris, where Mbappe had started the game on the bench because of fitness issues, PSG overhauled a 2-1 first-leg deficit.

But at the end of the tie, the Mbappe-Haaland rivalry of the future would be fully signposted, personalised, the Frenchmen joining teammates in mimicking the Norwegian's trademark goal celebration, the one where he sits on the grass, cross-legged, as if meditating.

Now the duel looks ready to take off, gain momentum, write fresh chapters season after season. Wednesday’s contest will be the third meeting between City and Madrid within nine months.

If the 2023 and 2024 European club champions both progress, as they would aspire to, into the later stages of this season’s Champions League, there may be further encounters after this league-phase encounter.

There’s a significant date in the summer, too: Norway versus France in Group I of the World Cup. “Mbappe and Haaland!” smiled France’s manager Didier Deschamps when the nations were allotted the same group. “Now we get to see a duel that has been going on remotely for a while.”

Remotely, because other than the first leg of Dortmund-PSG in 2020, and the Manchester leg of City-Madrid last season, they have not spent a full 90 minutes in direct opposition.

Back in February, in the Champions League play-off round, they briefly looked like dominant heavyweights ready to shape a contest one way or another.

Haaland gave City the lead in the tie with a skilfully cushioned volley; Mbappe equalised for Madrid with his own looping volley, although in his case he would be obliged to admit he made contact with the ball with his shin not his boot and the goal had a little luck about it.

Haaland then restored City’s lead with a penalty, but Madrid scored two late goals to take a 3-2 advantage.

For the rest of that tie, the 3-1 second leg home win that eased Madrid into the last 16, there was no Haaland. A knee injury meant he had to watch Mbappe score a hat-trick at the Bernabeu, since when the France captain has made a habit of them in Europe’s premier competition.

At the end of September, Mbappe registered three of Madrid’s five goals at Kairat Almaty. Two weeks ago, he scored all four in the 4-3 win at Olympiakos.

All part of a blistering personal record in this, Mbappe’s second season as the main man in Madrid’s attack: Nine goals in five European games so far and 25 in 21 across competitions.

Little wonder that his coach, Xabi Alonso, keeps talking up Mbappe’s “leadership qualities” while a growing number of critics of Xabi speak with alarm about a fragile team’s dependence on their sharpest striker to keep compensating for failings elsewhere.

Not so long ago, there were murmurs of concern about City’s being overreliant on Haaland, too. By the beginning of November, his goals made up 65 per cent of City’s total in the Premier League and Europe for 2025-26.

The balance has since evened out, and not because Haaland, whose 20 goals have come in 20 matches so far, has eased off but because others, such as Phil Foden, have stepped up to share the load. The ratio now is Haaland 44 per cent; others 56 per cent.

No such spread at troubled Madrid, where Mbappe has scored half his club’s Liga goals and three-quarters of the goals they have registered in the Champions League. That’s dependence. Of all the men they need to push through the pain barrier over the coming weeks, Mbappe is the top priority.