A picture taken in Madrid on Feb 20 shows a Spanish daily Marca’s cover showing an image of Paris St Germain’s French forward Kylian Mbappe amid a combination of several Marca’s covers. Mbappe, 25, has told the French side he will leave at the end of the season. The striker is heavily linked with Real Madrid, who have tried to sign him multiple times in the past few years and may finally get their man. — AFP
THIS time, Kylian Mbappe means it. The reports of his decision to leave Paris St Germain, his hometown team, might have carried with them an unmistakable sense of deja vu.
Given the background, of course, the cynical response is also the sensible one.
Mbappe has form here, after all. It is less than two years since he and PSG last came to the brink, his boxes packed, his desk emptied, his goodbye card signed.
And then, just as Real Madrid were preparing the Bernabeu for a celebratory unveiling, Mbappe stepped back from the brink.
Precisely what persuaded him to stay in Paris in 2022 is not clear. Perhaps it was the intervention of Emmanuel Macron, the French president.
Perhaps it was the promise of having an unusual influence on the club’s transfer policy. (Mbappe has always strenuously denied this was the case.)
Either way, there he was, clutching a jersey alongside Nasser al-Khelaifi, PSG’s chair, repeating the catechism that he could never leave his team, his city, his country so often that, by the time the news conference was over, Mbappe probably believed it, too.
There is, as yet, no reason to believe that this scenario will not play out again over the course of the next four to six months.
And yet the fact that we are here again – and so soon – is worth assessing. It illustrates, first and foremost, how curiously loveless the union between Mbappe and PSG seems to have been.
When he joined the club, back in 2017, it was possible to detect a romance even amid the dizzying swirl of zeros and commas required to describe the figures involved.
He was, after all, the greatest of the boys from the banlieues, the prodigal Parisian son: born and raised in Bondy, in the city’s neglected hinterland, now returning home as a conquering hero, a superstar-in-waiting.
He would be the symbol of not only what PSG wanted to be, but of where it was from, too.
The overriding feeling of the last seven years, though, has been distinctly transactional. PSG provided Mbappe with a permanent presence in the Champions League – only until the first knockout round, generally, but still – and also a slew of French championships and the sort of adulation and branding opportunities that befitted his status.
The presence of Mbappe, meanwhile, acted as proof of PSG’s potency, their virility, their authenticity as the modern super club their Qatari backers had always envisaged them to be.
There was something in the relationship for both of them, but it rarely seemed to run any deeper than that. Both sides spoke about an emotional bond. It appeared to exist rather more in theory than in practice.
That might, admittedly, have been different if the deal had fulfilled the hopes invested in it by both parties. In his time in Paris, Mbappe has emerged as one of the most marketable, most recognisable athletes on the planet. He is, without question, among the most talented players of his generation.
Looking back, though, it is hard to say – beyond his array of French championships, and his bank account – quite what he has to show for it.
He has scored hundreds of goals, and created hundreds more. He has frequently proved decisive in games, most recently when he swept his stuttering team to victory against Real Sociedad in the Champions League on Feb 15.
But choosing an iconic, defining moment is more elusive. Most of his domestic achievements are asterisked in some way by the fact that, well, PSG’s success is essentially inevitable.
Every single one of the club’s previous triumphs in the Champions League has proved no more than a way station on a road to disappointment.
The glorious interludes in Mbappe’s career – the things that, were he to retire tomorrow, he would be remembered for – have, instead, come with the French national team, both en route to victory in the 2018 World Cup and eventual disappointment in Qatar, four years later.
There is no shame in this; Pele is best remembered internationally in the yellow of Brazil, after all, rather than in the bright white of Santos.
Still, it is probably fair to assume it is not quite what Mbappe intended for his career; it is certainly not what PSG had in mind when they made an 18-year-old the second-most expensive player in history in the summer of 2017.
Mbappe, alongside first Neymar and then Lionel Messi, too, was supposed to establish the club as a genuine superpower, an equal of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and the giants of the Premier League.
It has not worked out like that. No matter how much money the club has thrown at the problem, no matter which coach it has appointed – Mbappe is now on his sixth – or what approach it has taken in the transfer market, PSG have failed to gatecrash the elite.
They have still never been a champion of Europe. They have, at times, drifted dangerously close to being something of a running joke. That certainly is not what Qatar had in mind when it first embarked on its adventure in football.
The temptation, then, is to read the story of Kylian Mbappe and PSG as a cautionary tale. It might, simultaneously, be cast as a parable about mutual benefit not being the same as love, a morality play about the distorting influence of money, and a sporting case study in the limited functionality of stardust as a building material.
Or, maybe, it will turn out to be none of those things. We do not yet know how the story ends.
We have, after all, been here before.
Mbappe was serious then, too. His mind was made up. He meant it. He was going to fulfill his childhood dream of playing for Real Madrid. He was going in search of another love story.
And then, in the end, he stepped back. Real Madrid’s offer was not compelling enough to convince him, and no other team could come close.
Even in the cash-soaked towers of the Premier League, the money required to make a deal for Mbappe work was just too eye-watering to consider. Mbappe wanted a contract that reflected his value.
But value is not a fixed figure. It depends entirely on context. It just so happens that Mbappe is worth more to his hometown club than he is to anyone else.
It is that reality, in fact, which lies at the root of their relationship: an agreement, in broad terms, on what he is worth. Maybe, this time, it will be different.
Maybe, in order to burnish his legacy, he will have to sacrifice something else. Or maybe, once again, he will find that no matter how much he wants to leave, his price is just too high.
Maybe, for all the lovelessness and the broken promises, arguably the best player of his generation has nowhere else to go. — NYT
