The Price of Being at the Top: The Hidden Cost of Fame for Athletes
What a Peugeot 206 on the Paris ring road and a hotel room one athlete calls his "royal jail" reveal about the cost of reaching the very top of world sport.
In October 2025, at a conference in Paris called Demain le Sport, Fayza Lamari sat on a panel titled "Mothers of Champions" next to Céline Bonnet, mother of the Olympic swimmer Léon Marchand.
The two women had spoken for an hour and a half on the phone, at Bonnet's initiative, comparing notes on what it does to a young man to become one of the most recognizable people on the planet before he's out of his twenties. On stage, Lamari, the mother of Kylian Mbappé, talked about her son with a candour that made headlines the next morning, in comments transcribed by Le Parisien.
She described a conversation with him from the year before, when things weren't going well. She'd asked if he wanted a girlfriend. "Do you see a woman in this mess?" he told her.
Then she told a smaller story that travelled even further. Sometimes, she said, Mbappé used to drive around the Paris ring road in a Peugeot 206, an ordinary hatchback, just to find out what normal life felt like. "He can't even walk in the street anymore," she said. "It makes me sad." Elsewhere on the same panel, she put the sharper version of the same point: in Paris, she said, the scrutiny on him had been like "a magnifying glass on his flaws; he was no longer human."
It's a small image of a hatchback circling a ring road at night but it does something a highlight reel can't. It shows one of the most gifted footballers alive having to simulate an ordinary evening because he could no longer just have one.
Mbappé is 27 now: a World Cup winner, captain of France, and, since his move to Real Madrid, one of the world's most recognisable athletes. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is really the subject of this piece.
The subject is a question that gets asked far less often than "how good is he": what does it actually cost to get that famous? Not the sort of "pressure" that turns up in every one of these athlete profiles in a vaguely generalized way at press conferences, but the literal thing that gets stripped away when enough people recognize your face?
It should be said, at the outset, that this is not an attempt to make the case that fame is somehow negative, or that these athletes are victims of their success. The money is real, as are the things that it can purchase, which include intergenerational financial security, a platform large enough to shift the national conversation, the means to build a foundation or a business or simply provide choices for your kids that you've never been able to offer.
Simone Biles has leveraged her visibility to change the conversation around athlete safety in American sport. The decision by Naomi Osaka to decline participation in a press conference has already changed the way that some tournaments approach their media responsibilities. Nobody here is asking to be pitied, and nobody interviewed for this story has said they'd trade the life back.
The more interesting question is what happens to the ordinary parts of a life once visibility reaches a level most people can't really picture. That's the trade this piece is actually about.
The Cost of Fame for Athletes: When Everyday Life Disappears
Fame at Mbappé's level isn't mostly a problem on the pitch. It's a problem for the parts of the week nobody would think to write about: the errands, the walks, the fifteen minutes between one obligation and the next.
His mother wasn't describing a red-carpet inconvenience when she said he can't walk down a street. She was describing a Tuesday afternoon.
Virat Kohli, who has spent close to two decades as arguably the most recognized sportsman in a country of 1.4 billion people, described what a hotel room becomes at that level of fame in a 2018 ESPN feature. "It's literally living in a royal jail," he said. "That's what I call our hotel rooms: royal jails. You can't do anything. I can't even think of going down to the hotel restaurant to eat. Forget going out of the hotel."
Room service, staff corridors instead of lobbies, and a schedule built around minimizing how many people see him move from one door to another—that's a routine travel day for Kohli, and has been for years.
Even that narrower version of privacy isn't guaranteed. During the 2022 T20 World Cup in Perth, a contractor working at Kohli's hotel filmed inside his room and posted the video online while he wasn't there. Kohli called it "an absolute invasion of privacy" in a statement to his tens of millions of followers. "If I cannot have privacy in my own hotel room," he wrote, "then where can I really expect any personal space at all?" The hotel apologised and removed the contractor. The video had already been watched by however many people wanted to watch it.
In 2023, LeBron James articulated a similar notion in an interview with the New York Times. When asked what price celebrity had cost him, he did not exaggerate. “I wish I could just step outside,” he remarked. “I wish I could just, you know, step into a movie theater and sit down, and step up to the concession stand and get some popcorn.” “I wish I could just step into an amusement park just like any normal person,” James continued. “I wish I could step into Target from time to time or Starbucks and have my name on the cup just like any normal person.” As a kind of caveat, he stated: “But I’m not sitting here complaining about it, of course not.”
None of these are really complaints about the job itself. They are an inventory of ordinary life: a walk, a coffee, a hotel breakfast—small freedoms that quietly disappear once enough strangers can recognise your face.
When Every Moment Becomes Public
For most jobs, a bad day is witnessed by a manager and a few colleagues, and it's forgotten within the week. At the level these athletes operate at, a bad day can become a permanent fact people know about you.
Osaka experienced this in one of its clearest forms. In September 2018, when she was 20 years old, she claimed her first ever Grand Slam victory over Serena Williams in a US Open final in which the match turned wild following Williams being hit with a code violation penalty and the spectators booing all through the trophy presentation ceremony.
Osaka, who had just accomplished the greatest victory of her career, had to collect her prize amid tears, apologizing to the audience for her victory. Osaka later said she had experienced "long bouts of depression" since the 2018 US Open, describing how difficult it had been to cope with the attention and pressure that followed.
Three years later, something similar occurred, but this time of her own choosing. Before the French Open in 2021, Osaka stated that she would avoid appearing at post-match press conferences to preserve her mental health, as she experienced "huge waves of anxiety" prior to meeting the press.
The tournament organizers fined her $15,000 and threatened a ban from future Grand Slams. Instead of complying with this order, Osaka pulled out of the competition. "I am not a natural public speaker," she noted, "and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world's media."
"A press conference, a fairly routine obligation in most professions had become something she needed to be fined into attending."
Other athletes describe the same mechanism running in the opposite direction: not a bad match turning into a story, but an ordinary decision doing it. In July 2010, LeBron James made his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join the Miami Heat live on ESPN in a show called The Decision.
A move that thousands of professionals do each year turned into a national television vote on his morality. His jerseys were burned by fans in the city of Cleveland while the team’s owner wrote an open letter to the public, describing it as a cowardly betrayal. He was 25 years old.
What connects Osaka's press conference and James's job change isn't the substance, it's the scale. Ordinary people quit jobs and lose tennis matches all the time. At a high enough level of fame, both can turn into events that strangers feel entitled to have opinions about.
When Sporting Success Becomes a Business
Some of this is simply what happens once a career gets large enough. Cristiano Ronaldo has spent years as Instagram's most-followed individual, with his audience growing from roughly 200 million followers in the late 2010s to more than half a billion. That's more people checking in on the marketing of one football career than live in the United States.
Mbappé's own operation reflects the same shift, in a detail that circles back to where this story started. His mother doesn't only support his career from the sidelines, she runs Interconnected Venture, a communications and PR consultancy for professional footballers, alongside other companies that manage his image rights and advertising deals. Somewhere along the way, "helping my son" and "running his image-rights business" became difficult to fully separate.
LeBron James has gone further than most, turning a playing career into an actual conglomerate. Along with childhood buddy Maverick Carter, he established The SpringHill Company, a media and production company behind Naomi Osaka’s documentary and the Space Jam sequel, which was reported to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, in addition to a life contract with Nike and a share in the Fenway Sports Group, which includes Liverpool FC and Boston Red Sox. His wealth was valued at more than a billion dollars in 2022 by Forbes.
This is not to say that any of this is complaining, and it is not meant to be. It's closer to a description of what "success" starts to mean once an athlete is good enough for long enough: a playing career becomes the seed for a media company, a sneaker deal, a production credit, a stake in a club on another continent. The athlete doesn't stop being an athlete. They also become a balance sheet and balance sheets get discussed, rated and second-guessed by people who've never met them.
The Challenge of Living a Private Life
Go back to the question Fayza Lamari asked her son. It wasn't really about dating. It was about whether it's still possible to build an ordinary relationship—the kind that starts slowly, without an audience, when a face is on billboards in forty countries. "Do you see a woman in this mess?" wasn't Mbappé being dramatic.
By his mother's account, it was closer to an honest answer: no, he didn't see how that particular ordinary thing was still available to him.
Other sportsmen and women have spoken about similar issues, though not specifically related to romance but more so to privacy in their case. Virat Kohli and his wife, the actress Anushka Sharma, have faced the wrath of fans and photographers pursuing them when they had gone out for their private moments, whether in India or overseas. Once, a fan filmed them on a stroll in London and shared the video on social media.
The objection wasn't about the relationship. It was about whether a walk could still just be a walk.
Neither example is a story about heartbreak. Nobody quoted here has said fame ended a relationship. It's something narrower, and in some ways harder to fix: the practical difficulty of doing the unglamorous, boring parts of getting close to someone—a coffee, a walk, a bad joke nobody else hears---when there's always a chance somebody is filming.
The Mental and Emotional Cost of Success
The cost of elite sport doesn't always show up in what athletes say about attention. Sometimes it appears in what they say about wanting to stop.
Simone Biles withdrew from the team final at the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021, mid-competition, after a vault that went wrong. She wasn't physically hurt. "It's been really stressful, this Olympic Games," she told reporters. "We also have to focus on ourselves, because at the end of the day we're human, too.
We have to protect our mind and our body, rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do." She later tied some of that weight to the years spent carrying the aftermath of USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar's abuse, which had been public for two years by the time she reached Tokyo.
"I should have quit way before Tokyo," she told New York Magazine, "when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much." She competed anyway, she said, because she wasn't going to let him take something she'd worked for since she was six.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, has said he had suicidal thoughts at the peak of his swimming career. In the HBO documentary he produced, The Weight of Gold, he described thinking of himself as "just a swimmer, and not a human being," and estimated that a large majority of Olympians go through some version of post-Olympic depression once the identity that structured their entire life disappears along with the competition.
Other athletes in the film, none of them household names, described the same crash after the cameras left.
Naomi Osaka's mental health struggles trace back to the moment she became famous in the first place. "I have suffered long bouts of depression since the US Open in 2018," she wrote in 2021, "and I have had a really hard time coping with that." She's said she wears headphones at tournaments partly to "dull my social anxiety."
Lewis Hamilton has spoken about depression going back to his school years, when he says he was bullied, at times physically, and told to "go back to my country." He carried that into a Formula 1 career built almost entirely without anyone who looked like him in the room.
"It's been generally quite a lonely journey," he said in 2022, ahead of the first Miami Grand Prix. "It's just been me and my family we're the only Black family [in F1]... most often I'm the only person of color in the room." In a more recent interview, he put it more plainly still: "Having success is not all that it's cracked up to be. It can be lonely at the top, especially when you're the first."
None of these athletes is saying fame alone caused what they went through. Biles was carrying institutional abuse; Hamilton was carrying childhood racism; Phelps was describing something that seems to affect a huge share of elite athletes regardless of fame level.
But fame changes the shape of the problem. It means working through a bad day, or a hard year, with millions of people already forming opinions about what you should have done differently.
The Things Money and Fame Cannot Replace
Put all of this side by side and a pattern shows up that's a little stranger than "fame is hard."
These are, by any financial measure, some of the freest people alive. Mbappé, Ronaldo and James have money most people will never see in a lifetime, arriving every year, with businesses and endorsement deals layered on top of their playing careers.
They can fly private, stay wherever they like, hire whoever they need. Ronaldo has, at various points, had the largest audience on the internet—a reach no government or company can simply buy.
And yet the specific freedoms that money is supposed to buy are the ones that keep turning up missing from their own accounts of their lives.
Mbappé could afford any car on earth and used to drive an ordinary hatchback around a ring road because what he wanted wasn't a nicer car; it was namelessness, which isn't for sale. Kohli can stay in whichever five-star hotel he chooses and still calls the room a "royal jail," because the walls don't stop people finding out which room it is. James can, in some sense, buy a movie theatre.
What he actually wants is to sit in someone else's, order popcorn, and not be noticed doing it and no amount of money converts into that.
The same goes for people. Half a billion Instagram followers is not the same thing as a handful of people you can fully trust, and more than one athlete here has effectively said as much, in their own words, when talking about who actually gets close to them versus who just watches. Being seen by everyone and being known by someone are not the same skill, and money doesn't obviously buy either one.
The Search for an Ordinary Life
Back to the Peugeot, then. It isn't a symbol of much on its own—one of the most ordinary cars ever sold in France, the kind of hatchback nobody in Paris looks at twice. Which is exactly what made it useful to Mbappé. For an hour, in traffic, going nowhere in particular, he could be one more person of no interest to anybody.
That detail matters more than the numbers in this piece—the net worths, follower counts and endorsement deals. Somewhere around the level of fame that Mbappé, or Kohli, or Biles, or James have reached, the ordinary things stop arriving by default and start needing to be arranged, or borrowed, or driven around a ring road at night in a car nobody would look at twice.
A walk. A coffee. A bad day nobody else hears about. A relationship that gets to start slowly, in private, the way most relationships do.
They didn't lose those things by accident, and it's unlikely most of them would trade back what they've built to get them returned. But somewhere in the last decade, for a small number of people on earth, the most ordinary parts of being alive quietly became the rarest thing they own.
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