PSG say Mbappe must sign a new deal or leave the club
It was at the unveiling of yet another new coach that the president of Paris St.-Germain made his first public statement about the future of his team’s best player. He did not hesitate and left little room for compromise.
Kylian Mbappé, the big player for PSG and France, must sign a new contract this summer or leave, Nasser al-Khelaifi told reporters, who were ostensibly gathered to hear the first statements from the new coach, Spaniard Luis Enrique, but eager to hear what the club intended to do about the uncertainty created by Mbappé following his public declaration last month that he wanted to move on beyond next season.
Such a scenario would put the club in the unenviable situation of losing without compensation a player in whom it has invested more than $500 million in transfer fees, bonuses and wages. That is something al-Khelaifi said should not happen.
“We don’t want him to leave for free in 2024,” al-Khelaifi said.
“Our position is clear,” he continued. “If Kylian wants to stay, we want him to stay. But he has to sign a new contract.
“We don’t want to lose the best player in the world for free. It’s impossible.”
And that was that. Al-Khelaifi, as he got up to leave the elevated platform he had shared with Enrique, told the assembled members of the news media that he expected to have gotten what they came for. The new coach, for his part, declined to say whether he expected Mbappé to be in Paris this summer when the new season kicks off.
What is clear is that the fate of where Mbappé plays for a second successive summer will overshadow PSG’s efforts to prove that it is now a serious contender for football’s biggest trophy rather than yet again the center stage for the sport’s greatest intrigue.
Enrique, who last coached the Spain national team, arrived on Wednesday and is tasked with bringing order to a club that has been marked by disarray in recent seasons. This week, his predecessor, Christophe Galtier, who arrived just last summer, became the latest PSG coach to be dismissed before his contract expired.
No football club has spent more money on talent since Qatar Sports Investments took over PSG about a decade ago. Few top clubs have had so many coaches, and fewer have still wasted so much time and money searching for an identity and style that underpins all that generosity.
Last summer, PSG persuaded Mbappé to sign a new contract rather than signing with Real Madrid, the Spanish superclub he has long dreamed of playing for. PSG had wanted to build a new model, with Mbappé as the central star in a constellation of mainly young, mainly French talent. Without him, that master plan would have to be rethought.
Later al-Khelaifi was even sharper. He sat down with members of the domestic news media and said Mbappé had “up to” two weeks to decide whether to sign a new contract. The club, he said, would not allow such a valuable asset to leave for nothing in 12 months. Mbappe, al-Khelaifi was pointed out, could just decide to stay, making it impossible for the club to determine his fate.
Al-Khelaifi said that would be unthinkable – that Mbappé would break some unwritten convention by doing something the world’s best players simply don’t do. He failed to mention that PSG had done just that two summers ago, signing Argentina great Lionel Messi as a free agent when Barcelona, the team Messi had played for throughout his career, could no longer afford to keep him.
“If he won’t sign,” said al-Khelaifi, “the door is open.”
Privately, the club has exchanged letters with Mbappé’s management team, which is led by his mother, Fayza Lamari. This week, the latest message, which spans three pages, expressed disappointment at the position Mbappé had taken and reminded the player and his family how much PSG had invested in the striker since his teens.
Upon signing his contract, Mbappé was given a rare measure of influence over the club’s operations, including a say in the recruitment of the players who would join him. The club’s letter, requesting an urgent meeting, said the same thing, acknowledging that while the club had not been able to meet all its demands for reinforcements, it had done as much as it could given the restrictions placed on it. were imposed by the European Union. football rules about expenses.
PSG will resume training on July 10, but Mbappé, along with others who played for their national teams in June, will return on July 17. By then, the club hopes to have clarity on whether he will accept his request for a new contract. It hopes he will, even if it wouldn’t diminish the chances of him leaving next summer. A new contract expiring after the end of next season would allow PSG to recoup a fee. Shortly after signing his current contract last summer, Mbappé told The New York Times in an interview that it would not have felt right to leave the club through free agency.
In the rarefied world Mbappé lives in, both for his talent and his earning potential, the pool of clubs he could sign with is small and perhaps even limited to one: Real Madrid.
That club is looking for a big forward after losing veteran striker Karim Benzema to Saudi Arabia’s land grab, and Mbappé has said he will play there one day. To align the stars, the club would need to be convinced to make an offer to PSG for a player they know they can bring in next year without a fee. So far it has been tight-lipped about its plans.
In the time representing her son, Lamari has become a skilled hand at securing the best possible deal. Last summer, with a deal with Real Madrid in hand, and the suggestion that Premier League club Liverpool, an unlikely suitor, also had a keen interest, she managed to secure a huge new contract. It guaranteed a bonus of more than $100 million, as well as a re-signing fee even before his stratospheric new salary was included.
PSG announced the deal would run until 2025, and Mbappé even wore a jersey with the year number on his back. It was only later revealed that the third year was an option that only the player could exercise.
Lamari will again take center stage in face-to-face talks with club executives in the coming days. Only then will it become clear whether, as al-Khelaifi told reporters, “no one is bigger than the club.”