It seemed to be a perfect game: the best French footballer agrees to act for his hometown. And for a while it was.
Kylian Mbappé was the star attraction that the main French team, Paris St.-Germain, had planned to build for the years to come. His owners, an arm of the Qatar government, reported him in Paris from Monaco in 2017 for about $ 200 million, a record agreement for a teenager and at the time the second highest tax ever in football.
The goals have been scored, the trophies were guaranteed, Mbappé became one of the most famous athletes in the world and the link between the player and the club has been forged. Then the problem came.
Mbappé, who is now 26 years old, had since childhood dreamed of playing for Real Madrid of Spain – the royalty of football – and his possibility arrived in 2022 with his expiring contract. In the end, he stood still, but only after an Herculean effort that provided for Cajoling by President Emmanuel Macron in France and what the club says was the richest contract in European football.
But just as quickly as things have gone, they started to reveal. Mbappé left Paris after only two seasons, a year before her agreement had been widely understood to run. His move triggered a bitter and prolonged legal dispute, with Mbappé who accused his former harassment club and asking that he pays 55 million euros (about $ 61 million), he says he is due. Paris St.-Germain, in turn, refused to pay, saying that Mbappé had a verbal agreement, to give in that money and leave on good relationships, with the president of the team and the Qatar emissary to global football, Nasser al-Khelaifi.
The disagreement provides a rare public look at the global market for the talents of football, putting one of the most important and influential athletes in the world against a small but powerful and powerful Persian Gulf country. Qatar has emerged in the last ten years as one of the greatest players of global sports, using his investments to increase his profile and host the 2022 world cup.
During an unusual press conference on Thursday in Paris, Mbappé’s lawyers said they had intensified their case, presenting complaints in several places. They asked a court to partially freeze the PSG bank accounts for the money that their customer believes he was due and presented a petition to the French football federation to block the team to play in Elite Champions League.
“The club is not above the law and the law is on the player side,” said Thomas Clay, one of Mbappé’s lawyers.
Paris St.-Germain rejected the statements as “last parallel universe of the imaginative narrative”.
A pungent rift
After becoming the player that the PSG believed that he would build his team, Mbappé’s decision to stay in Paris proved to be short -lived. Madrid’s bait, the power of childhood dreams, proved to be too great to be resisted.
Within a year from the new signature with PSG, Mbappé informed the team he wanted to leave as a free agent, refusing to exercise an option to stay for the third season. It was a particularly difficult revelation for fans, because when Mbappé had agreed in 2022 to stay with the team, he wore a shirt with 2025 on the back to indicate the year in which the option passed. Many assumed this meant that he was working in the team for three years.
Mbappé’s departure in 2024 deprived the PSG not only of a generational talent, but also the opportunity to recover the 180 million euros that had originally paid his former team to bring him to Paris in 2017.
The team tried to elaborate an agreement with Mbappé. They asked him to consider two options, both that they would allow him to leave, but also to prevent the team from losing so much money.
Below the first, Mbappé would sign an extension of the contract that included a guaranteed sale if another club that wanted to play-obviously, Real Madrid-Paga a nine-digit commission; The second involved Mbappé commit to renouncing tens of millions of euros in wage commitments and bonuses, equal to 55 million euros, to leave as a free agent on good relationships.
Contracts have been developed, but nothing signed and PSG described the offer of the two options as an “agreement for gentlemen” between Mbappé and Al-Khelaifi.
The agreement quickly transformed into the dispute. Mbappé accused the PSG of harassment after declaring that he wanted to leave, including leaving him home for a preset tour. PSG questioned Mbappé’s integrity because the letter that in the end sent to the club down for the option for a third season was dated July 2022, a few weeks after recommending to the team.
The French football authorities asked for mediation to resolve the dispute. It didn’t happen.
A lasting struggle
Thursday in a conference room of the hotel on the 10th floor, the Eiffel Tower that looms behind them, four lawyers for Mbappé have outlined a series of cases that have brought in the last few days, before the sports rulers and civil and criminal courts and courts, after leaving that the PSG would commit himself for a year.
Mbappé had both tired of waiting for money that he felt he was due and of imprecise stories on the saga for his contract, said his lawyers. The explanation, the longtime lawyer of Mbappé, Delphine Verheyden, was simple: Mbappé had a contract and the PSG had not honored him.
She and the other lawyers also described how the club officials have put pressure on Mbappé – threatening to put him on the bench for a season and damage his reputation – in his efforts to convince him to sign an amendment to his contract that would have helped the club not only to save money, but also to save in the event that he left.
The PSG denounced the press conference, accusing Mbappé of rejecting “a friendly solution” and refusing to bring the case to a work court. One of Mbappé’s lawyers replied that such cases generally take years to resolve.
Mbappé’s lawyers said that Paris St.-Germain was not by simply for personal gain, but also to help the lesser known players who could be in the same situation. His struggle, they added, apparently without irony, was even on behalf of the French people, who according to them would have benefited from tens of millions of euros in taxes that he and the club would pay if the dispute was resolved in his favor.
“If we want to fear the reaction of the club that the club is omnipotent, we will never make it,” said Clay, an arbitration specialist hired by Mbappé. “The club will not be happy and the Qatar will not be happy, this is certain.”
The saga also underlines how to rely on personal relationships still dominates the football industry. According to the documents examined by the New York Times, Mbappé and his directors had spoken and started writing an amendment to agree. But in the end, nobody was signed.
Seriously bruised by the saga, PSG has decided to never repeat his strategy of building his team around a singular figure, it does not matter how talented or famous.
That new posture – a departure from a system that preceded Mbappé to the first days of the Qatar property that started in 2011 – seems to serve it well. The club won praise for having performed as the sum of its parts and is well put to hit the dreams of its owners to win the Champions League, the largest premium in European football, after having comfortably beat the English opposition in the first quarter -finals of two games on Wednesday evening.
An embarrassing encounter with Mbappé in the competition may have to wait. His new team, Real Madrid, suffered a 3-0 defeat for Arsenal based in London in his first game of the quarter-finals of the evening before, leaving him in the need for a great reversal when they meet again next week.