Mbappé donates signed shirt at Marrakech Padel Cup festival

Kylian Mbappé put football’s biggest kind of pull into a padel festival in Marrakech, donating one of his signed shirts to SOS Villages d’Enfants Maroc during the inaugural MBD Padel Cup Festival. The gesture came as the event brought together more than 160 players, along with sports, entertainment and business figures, and gave the charity angle real weight instead of leaving it as background noise.

The Marrakech stop ran from June 4 to 7, 2026, and the festival’s own promotional material listed 64 men’s teams, a strong field for a first edition. That scale mattered. It showed the MBD Padel Cup was built as more than a celebrity-friendly exhibition, with a format that leaned on competition, networking and social visibility at the same time. Registration for the Marrakech edition had been opened through the festival’s own sign-up push, and the event was framed around padel’s social, cross-generational appeal.

The Mbappé shirt donation sat at the center of that pitch. One Instagram post said Mbappé had donated one of his signed shirts to SOS Children’s Villages Morocco during the inaugural festival in Marrakech. Another thanked him for his support and for offering his shirt in aid of children from SOS Village. A separate post described a convivial moment at the Village d’Enfants, where the festival’s founder and players spent time with children accompanied by SOS Villages d’Enfants Maroc.

That is where the festival’s value line becomes clearer. Padel has been looking for ways to borrow reach from football without losing its own identity, and Mbappé’s involvement did exactly that. The shirt delivered a recognizable global name, but the setting kept the focus on Morocco, on children in care, and on a sport trying to expand its footprint through events that mix competition with philanthropy.

For North Africa, that combination is the point. The MBD Padel Cup used a high-profile football name to widen attention, then tied that attention to a charity benefit and a gathering of players and business figures in Marrakech. The jersey was the hook, but the real story was a festival trying to turn padel into a platform that can sell tickets, build relationships and raise support in the same weekend.