PSG Kylian Mbappé Calls out Winamax over Poor Taste Marketing

Winamax has been known as a maverick French sports and poker platform that has often taken to social media to make testy statements, including about some of its partners. The platform has fallen out with soccer clubs it sponsored and was also targeted by the country’s regulator on at least one occasion.

Now, the platform has managed to anger Paris Saint-Germain’s forward Kylian Mbappé by tweeting an indecent image and captioning it “Mbappé’s dad when his son scores against South Africa.”

Have Some Respect, Mbappé Tells Winamax

Mbappé saw the image, though, and tweeted back a message that was clearly unhappy with Winamax’s poor social media behavior. He said: “The dangers of betting online have no limits. I’d ask you for a bit of respect, please.”

Twitter users, who are known to support Winamax and its often demeaning humor flocked to Mbappé’s account in defense of the operator. They said that the image shared by Winamax was used by Kindred Group’s Unibet, which has a marketing partnership with Paris Saint-Germain.

Under that deal, the brands have the ability to control imagery related to marketing purposes. Winamax does not, however.

Winamax Ruffles Feathers in France

The operator has already managed to get itself in trouble with L’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), the French gaming regulator, which ordered it to take down an offending gambling ad.

Girondins de Bordeaux, a Ligue 1 soccer club, decided to end its partnership with Winamax effectively immediately in January, citing continuous mockery from the operator’s social media accounts about the team’s poor performance in the season.

None of this was as serious as the calls to revoke the company’s license for posting a “homophobic” tweet back in 2020. Winamax managed to dodge a bullet there, winning points with its loyalist followers but alienating those who have always fought it as a brash company even further.