Kylian Mbappe’s transfer saga will determine PSG and Real Madrid’s future
Do you ever find yourself standing in a pool of light, a moment of clarity when football’s march to rampant late-stage capitalism knocks you sideways just a little?
This week, a report in La Parisien suggested that the Emir of Qatar is angry with Kylian Mbappe over his public statement about staying in Paris for another year, a sentence that demands reading more than once. We’ve come a long way from John Barnes being transferred to Watford for some training kit.
All the ingredients are present for the greatest transfer story ever told: the kings of history Real Madrid and the nouveau riche, self-styled prince regents Paris Saint-Germain. The boy wonder who grew up in Paris and eventually became France’s anointed king there, only to seek his fortune elsewhere. The tale of broken promises, broken trust and a broken clock, given that the whole thing seems to have been going on for two or three decades.
And now, outright stalemate. Mbappe says that he is happy to see out the final year of his contract. PSG say that he must leave now if he doesn’t sign a new contract and Real Madrid wait to learn whether they will sign Mbappe now or later. Every actor has a degree of ownership and power, but crucially not enough to decide what happens next alone.
On we go, with resentment and anger and bitterness escaping out of every pore and nobody making ground or new friends. Every leak or public statement simply erodes any notion of goodwill. Mbappe says that PSG are not a serious club. PSG point out that he said he would never leave on a free. Former players and coaches crawl out to accuse Mbappe of failing to lead the team.
All the while Real Madrid hang around quietly like that playground snitch. “Oooh you should hear what he said about you when you weren’t here”.
This should all be deeply tedious, and on various levels really is. Even those who obsess about these sorts of things, those who while away the summer hours by replying “small club” and “any news” to transfer journalists on social media, have grown to accept that there is no point asking about this one.
Everything is done so publicly, and everyone so damn famous, that it is impossible to miss anything. Mbappe could pass wind quietly and someone would be there to interpret it as a “cryptic transfer message”.
And yet..and yet…the soap opera is inescapable and we secretly don’t want to escape it. This is a story rolled in diamonds that glint to catch your eye. Mbappe is not one of the ageing superstars rolling off to Riyadh for the ultimate final pay day in the sun, nor a B-list midfielder whose name is kept on the back pages by a savvy agent.
He is the leading candidate to be the best – and most marketable – player of his time, leaving one of the world’s richest clubs to join another, potentially as the ultimate Bosman signing. How this plays out will decide the next age of two superclubs and one super-talent, with associated knock-on effects.
Mbappe to Real Madrid just fits; no doubt. He was made for this, or at least he became it very quickly. Gone is Real’s Galactico age with its Gatsby-ian extravagance and celebritocracy and relative underachievement, replaced by a smooth determination to have defenders who can defend and attackers who are magnificent and ruthless.
Karim Benzema’s departure creates a space for which Mbappe is hardly a replica replacement, but you suspect he and they could make it work and he is no pure Galactico. A return of 212 goals in 260 games at PSG is enough evidence of what he might do to those La Liga defenders who miss the chance to kick him.
There is something a little melancholic about all this airing of dirty laundry, particularly on the part of Mbappe. In those early outings, we saw him as this explosion of pace and skill, all dipped shoulders and blurred legs and then the smile after he killed you. It was the insouciance that made Mbappe so alluring, given the rapidity of the rise, and perhaps we mistook it for innocence and naivety.
Mbappe has done nothing hideously wrong, of course; any miscalculation is probably on us not him. But he is acutely aware of his own power and intends to wield it. He is a brand behemoth.
Any sadness is quickly engulfed by the glorious schadenfreude into which Paris’ gold-plated football club is now sinking. It would be stupid to opine haughtily that any sporting project with access to billions of pounds has failed, but PSG are becoming a morality tale and they shouldn’t bother waiting around for sympathy.
You searched the world for the right answer and the best one grew up across the city from where you stand. And he wants to leave because nobody has managed to tie together the individual strands into a family and thus make a team as great as the sum of its parts. Money can’t buy you love, nor good sense.
The rest of us, if we can permit ourselves a little self-interest, wait with anticipation for the end. The closure of an interminable saga, yes, but also Mbappe in Madrid as king of a new world.
At PSG, he became swallowed up a little by the insistence on bathing everything in gold. That World Cup final last December was one of the great individual displays of our time and it made us hungry for more of him in big games that matter.
So yes, I’ll allow myself one slip: #AnnounceMbappe. Until then, we’re all just Kylian time.
