Despite signing a new contract with PSG in the summer, Kylian Mbappe has been linked to moves away from the club.
Despite the fact that it hasn’t been talked in a while, Kylian Mbappe and Liverpool have come up once more.
Over the previous couple of years, whenever Mbappe transfer rumors have appeared, you can almost always bet that the Reds will be mentioned as potential suitors immediately thereafter, regardless of how unlikely such a trade may be.
Anfield has occasionally been mooted as a potential destination for the French prodigy since Mbappe stated that Liverpool is his mother’s favorite team and Reds boss Jurgen Klopp has openly acknowledged the 24-year-old’s skills.
When Mbappe, who had been engaged in some insane cat and mouse game with Real Madrid, pledged his future to PSG earlier in 2022, those rumors seemed to have been put to rest. It only needed a €50 million (£43.7 million) yearly salary, a €100 million signing bonus, complete ownership of his image rights, and the participation of French President Emmanuel Macron. Absolutely normal.
Mbappe’s previous contract with PSG was set to end in the summer of 2022, and following a protracted PR campaign on the part of both parties, he was anticipated to join Real Madrid. With only a few months left on his contract, the Spanish team had made an offer of up to €200 million for his services, which PSG categorically rejected.
Florentino Perez, the president of Real Madrid, was disappointed that Mbappe chose to remain in France because he wanted to bring back the “Galactico” era to the Spanish city.
However, Mbappe and PSG are no longer a happy couple, and speculation about his departure is still prevalent. According to reports, the forward wants to leave Paris, but Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the PSG chairman and the head of the club’s owners, Qatar Sports Investments, is prepared to play hardball with his team’s star player. He made the promise earlier this week at the unveiling of Luis Enrique as PSG manager, saying that it would be “impossible” for him to leave on a free transfer at the end of next season.
This new development has set pulses racing and it was claimed on Thursday by Spanish journalist Edu Aguirre of popular show El Chiringuito that Liverpool had made a bid of €200m for Mbappe. As with the previous attempts to link Liverpool with a move for the French international, it seems far fetched, not least as it appears almost set in stone that Real Madrid will try to be his next destination, something that the Spanish media would dearly love to see. Hamming up the potential transfer interest in a player by other clubs, when it might not be rooted in reality, wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility.
With a number of major European clubs on the UEFA ‘watchlist’ when it comes to potential Financial Fair Play breaches, signing Mbappe is something completely off the table for some. Liverpool, with a large amount of headroom when it comes to FFP due to their more austere approach to transfer spend, are one of the clubs who, theoretically, could afford to extricate the Frenchman from the Parc des Princes. However, the theory and the reality are not the same.
The narrative around Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group among some sections of the Reds fan base has been that they are far tighter with the purse strings that the owners at rival clubs. Player trading has long been used to help offset transfer spend while wages, while they have grown significantly under FSG’s tenure, remain at around 60 to 65 per cent of revenue, well below the recommended UEFA limit of 70 per cent.
The Reds broke their transfer record with the signing of Darwin Nunez from Benfica last summer, a deal that could rise to as much as £85m. In order to land a player like Mbappe the fee required has been reported to be between £250m and £300m. That is world record breaking stuff, the kind of sums that have so grotesquely distorted the transfer market and contributed to the enormous gulf that now exists between the biggest clubs and the rest.
But say that FSG give that the green light and press on to the next phase, the small matter of his reported wages of around £800,000 per week – more than double what Mohamed Salah’s new deal has been reported to be worth, would take things into the farcical. How would sums like that be squared with existing members, those wanting to renew and new signings? Amortised, the transfer cost over six years at £300m would stand at £50m, the annual sum that Liverpool get from their most lucrative guaranteed commercial deal, the front of shirt sponsorship from Standard Chartered.
But we’ll carry on. That’s been agreed. We’re all there now. Oh, there is the not so insignificant matter of the fact that PSG, backed by the almost limitless wealth of Qatar Sports Investments, agreed to allow Mbappe 100 per cent control over his image rights. Mbappe’s image rights issue reared its head last year with the French national side when he refused to endorse certain sponsors when on international duty.
The value of commercial deals for clubs like Liverpool is vast and part of that value is that companies get to use players on occasion for promotional activity. If Mbappe has the ability to simply refuse to endorse certain sponsorships then that then affects the potential value, especially if there is no value to be had in tapping into the most marketable player a team could have.
