On Wednesday at MetLife Stadium, Kylian Mbappe will face Paris Saint-Germain as a Real Madrid player for the first time in the second semi-final of the Club World Cup.
Mbappe is yet to start a match at the tournament — where the winners will take home $40million (£29.5m) from the final alone — owing to sickness, but he came off the bench in the 3-2 win against Borussia Dortmund to score an acrobatic goal and announce himself at the same venue last Sunday.
Whether the 26-year-old is strong enough to start against Champions League winners PSG on Wednesday remains to be seen, but the Frenchman is expected to play some part against his old club.
He is top of PSG’s scoring charts, after all, with 256 goals during seven seasons at the club. He became captain and won six Ligue 1 titles — but failed to win the Champions League.
The story of Mbappe’s move to the Bernabeu last summer and his strained relations with PSG could fill several tomes, given the intensity of Madrid’s almost decade-long pursuit of the forward — and the fallout continues to this day. On Tuesday evening, less than 24 hours before the semi-final against his old club, Mbappe posted a picture of himself on Instagram wearing the navy of PSG. The word ‘GOAT’ — greatest of all time but also a company that is a PSG sponsor — was repeated on the advertising hoardings around him.
Here, The Athletic outlines why, over a year on from his exit, Mbappe is still in dispute with PSG over his claim of an unpaid bonus worth more than €55m (£47.4m; $64.5m), the extreme lengths Madrid went to finally secure their man and the attempts PSG and their Qatari owners made to keep him at the club (including interventions from the most senior French politicians).
How many times did Real Madrid try — and fail — to sign Mbappe?
Mbappe always appeared destined to play for Madrid, back to when he was pictured in his teens in his bedroom with photographs of Cristiano Ronaldo on his wall. Interest in Mbappe exploded following a breakout 2016-17 season at Monaco, which led to enquiries from Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Madrid.
Monaco vice president Vadim Vasilyev told Canal+ in 2017 that his team had received an offer that was “impossible to refuse” from the club of Mbappe’s dreams (reported to have been worth up to €180million). Yet Madrid at the time still had Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema.
Instead, Mbappe joined PSG on an initial one-year loan deal that would then become a permanent €180million transfer. This was the same summer PSG broke the world record to sign the Brazilian Neymar for €222million from Barcelona.
At the end of his first season with PSG, Mbappe went stratospheric, as the star of the 2018 World Cup, where he lifted the trophy and scored four goals. For a couple of years, Mbappe and PSG existed relatively happily, save for their inability to get over the line in the Champions League.
The financial pressure of the global pandemic and stadium improvements meant Madrid would not return for him until the summer of 2021, when Mbappe had only one year remaining on his deal at PSG. Mbappe rejected two contract renewal offers from PSG, leaving the club’s sporting director Leonardo to conclude in September that year it was “clear” the player wanted to leave.
Madrid made an offer of €160m in the final week of the summer transfer window, but it was rejected. PSG rationalised their decision by saying they still owed the final €36m instalment of his transfer to Monaco, so with only a few days to spare in the market, a pot of €124m would not adequately replace Mbappe.
A second offer from Madrid was made verbally, closer to the €180m PSG had committed for Mbappe, but PSG again resisted.
This did not go down well in the Spanish capital, where Madrid are used to getting their own way.
The late-night gossip show El Chiringuito had superimposed Mbappe’s face over a countdown clock in the final days of the window, anticipating his arrival. The Madrid-based newspaper AS published a mock-up of Mbappe in a PSG shirt, this time superimposed behind jail bars.
The summer of 2021 presented a short-term win for PSG, with Mbappe lining up alongside Neymar and the newly arrived Lionel Messi, as the French club assembled a catalogue of star names, all of which sought to increase prestige for Qatar before its World Cup in the winter of 2022. But Mbappe’s contract remained set to expire in the summer of 2022.
Everyone expected Madrid to strike, picking up arguably the world’s best forward on a free transfer. The New York Times reported that EA Sports, the maker of the FIFA video game, had started to prepare a version of Mbappe in Real Madrid colours.
During the 2021-22 season, Mbappe was booed by the PSG home crowd, and then received spray-painted death threats on his mural in the Parisian suburb of Bondy in January 2022, even in a season where he scored 39 goals and PSG won Ligue 1.
Again, Madrid expected him to join — but PSG again stunned European football and persuaded Mbappe to stay.
PSG made Mbappe the best-paid footballer in the world at the time, while France president Emmanuel Macron also asked him to stay at the club. Mbappe’s mother, Fayza Lamari, subsequently admitted to French newspaper Le Parisien that she wanted him to leave PSG in 2022, while Kylian’s father, Wilfried, wanted him to stay longer. She insisted Kylian made the final decision.
Mbappe said of Macron. “He told me: ‘I want you to stay. I don’t want you to leave now. You are so important for the country’. When the president says that to you, that counts.”
He signed a two-year contract extension until the summer of 2024, with the option of a further year.
Why were PSG so upset about Mbappe finally joining Real Madrid in 2024?
Much of the tension can be traced back to the extension signed in 2022.
Upon unveiling the deal on the pitch at the Parc des Princes in Paris, Mbappe held up a jersey with 2025 on the back, despite the two-year deal only running until 2024 — and a one-year option needing to be triggered to make it until 2025.
Mbappe had created a huge amount of leverage, allowing his contract at PSG to run down to the final five weeks, while holding talks with Madrid and appearing to play the two clubs off against each other.
According to arguments presented in the Paris Judicial Court, this led to an agreement worth €33.3m as an annual basic income net for each of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons. In addition, he would receive bonuses with a net worth of €82.6m — €48.9m of signing bonuses, €26.6m as a loyalty bonus and €7.1m in other unspecified bonuses.
Then, if the option to extend until 2025 was triggered, he would continue on the same €33.3m net basic income, receive another €26.6m net as a bonus for the option being exercised, as well as a loyalty bonus worth €55m in gross terms and €24.4m net.
Owing to this huge financial commitment by PSG, a clause was also agreed that if Mbappe chose not to trigger the one-year option to extend until 2025 by the summer of 2023, then he could be sold for a minimum fee of €180m to a different club.
Mbappe then informed PSG in June 2023 that he did not intend to remain beyond the two-year deal.
This is where matters deteriorated, as PSG faced losing the player for nothing, having committed hundreds of millions to his transfer fee, salary and bonuses over the years.
Mbappe refused to move to Saudi Arabia, despite PSG accepting a world-record €300million (then £259m; $332m) bid from Al Hilal for the French forward in July 2023. He instead had his heart set on a move to Madrid at the end of his contract in 2024. However, PSG considered any talks between Madrid and Mbappe while he was still under contract at PSG to have been inappropriate — and arguably a breach of his loyalty bonuses — and they set about attempting to push through a sale to Madrid that summer, a year early.
Mbappe was placed on the transfer list and left out of a summer tour to Japan. He was sent to the “loft”, essentially a group of players considered persona non grata who would be sold by the club. He did not start the club’s domestic season-opening game against Lorient on August 12, 2023.
However, following meetings between PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, head coach Luis Enrique and Mbappe, the Frenchman was restored to the first-team fold for the next Ligue 1 game one week later against Toulouse.
PSG were left with the impression Mbappe would either extend again or reduce his bonuses owed for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 season to €79m in gross terms to ensure the club were not excessively out of pocket. Mbappe told French broadcaster RMC that the outcome of the meeting ensured all parties were “protected”, but it is contested whether a gentleman’s agreement was actually agreed and signed in writing.
Ultimately, Mbappe left PSG at the end of the 2023-24 season to join Madrid.
He has since sought to recover €55million he believes he is owed in unpaid bonuses. He accused PSG of “moral harassment”, according to the Paris prosecutor, owing to his treatment at the start of the 2023-24 season when he was excluded from the first team, a case he has now dropped, according to the Associated Press.
He has previously attempted to have €55.4m frozen in PSG’s accounts with the Qatar National Bank, which ended up costing him €10,000 when the Paris judicial court overturned a precautionary seizure of the funds.
In a press conference reported by the BBC in May, Mbappe’s lawyers claimed they had “gone on the attack” to try and seize the cash. They also alleged PSG pressured him to renew via “scandalous and indecent practices”, while supporting the French players’ union in their campaign to end the “loft”, the increasingly common practice in football where players are made to train independently from the main group when they are deemed unwanted during a transfer window.
The French Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) — the French body that runs professional leagues — initially ruled in favour of Mbappe when the forward appealed to them, but has subsequently reversed this. The LFP said it did not have jurisdiction to rule on the matter due to an ongoing civil court case and the French Football Federation also dismissed an appeal by Mbappe for the same reasons. European football’s governing body, UEFA, has also declined to be involved.
The civil case remains ongoing — separate to the legal filing for “moral harassment” — with Mbappe seeking his €55m and PSG counter-claiming for €98m, arguing it was money they missed out on by being unable to sell the player while he was under contract.
The matter could yet end up in an industrial tribunal, but for now at least, the withdrawal of the “harassment” case, combined with suggestions of improving relations, suggests a compromise agreement may be privately found between the parties. Mbappe’s father, Wilfried, watched PSG beat Inter Miami in the Club World Cup in Atlanta alongside PSG executives in June.
How has Mbappe’s exit turned out for PSG, Real Madrid and the player?
In Mbappe’s first season, he has scored 42 goals, the most of any player in a debut season at Real Madrid, but they failed to win either La Liga or the Champions League and head coach Carlo Ancelotti left the club for Brazil at the end of the campaign.
PSG, for their part, appear to be a team reborn under Luis Enrique, reconstructing their front line with Ousmane Dembele, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Desire Doue, and they won their first Champions League, beating Inter Milan 5-0 in Munich in May. PSG no longer appear to be in thrall to individual stars, with the collective needs of the team increasingly prioritised. There is much more to that than Mbappe’s departure — PSG also moved on Messi and Neymar, while recruiting younger players with points to prove.
Speaking after PSG’s 4-0 win against Inter Miami in Atlanta earlier in the Club World Cup, Luis Enrique hailed his team’s improved cohesion.
“It is special (our collective spirit),” the PSG head coach concluded. “Every team wants to play collectively. This is not an individual sport. The most important thing is to be a team on and off the ball. That’s our idea.”
(Top photos: Diego Souto, Christian Liewig, Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)
