Kylian Mbappé just did something that took most of football’s greatest players an entire career to even approach. The French striker has now scored 20 goals in 20 FIFA World Cup appearances, a perfect 1.00 goals-per-game ratio that ties Lionel Messi’s all-time World Cup goal tally.

Mbappé’s World Cup journey has been absurdly efficient. He put up four goals during France’s triumphant 2018 campaign, then added eight more in the 2022 tournament, including a hat trick in what many consider the greatest World Cup final ever played. His continued scoring in the ongoing 2026 tournament has pushed him to the 20-goal mark, matching Messi’s record in an identical number of matches.

Unauthorized Solana-based meme tokens, specifically $MBAPPE and $MBAPEPE, have experienced significant trading spikes correlated with his recent goals. Neither token has any official connection to the player. Neither is endorsed, sanctioned, or acknowledged by Mbappé or his representatives.

This isn’t Mbappé’s first intersection with the digital asset world. In June 2022, he became an ambassador and investor in Sorare, an Ethereum-based NFT fantasy sports platform. Then in 2024, Mbappé’s X account was hacked, and the attackers used it to promote a fraudulent MBAPPE token. The token briefly reached hundreds of millions in market cap before collapsing, leaving a trail of losses for anyone who aped in based on what appeared to be the player’s endorsement.

The current crop of unauthorized tokens trading on his World Cup performance carries the same fundamental risk profile as the 2024 hack incident, just without even the pretense of an official endorsement to begin with. Anyone considering exposure to these tokens should treat them with the same risk framework they’d apply to any unaudited, unendorsed meme coin: position sizing that assumes a total loss scenario, and an exit plan that doesn’t depend on the French national team’s tournament bracket.