The Daily, 26th July 2023
The most striking thing about the Mbappe saga is the shock and awe.
The most striking aspect of the now-rapidly unfolding Kylian Mbappe to Saudi Arabia transfer story is the shock and awe of it all. The plot-line reads like an episode of Dynasty. PSG want to sell Mbappe because he only has one year left on his contract and they don’t want him scarpering off to Madrid, Manchester or wherever for nothing. Since he can sign a pre-contract elsewhere from January on, this means that they need to sell now.
Mbappe has told PSG that he does not wish to sign an extension with them, but he is under no obligation to leave the club because they have accepted the offer from Saudi Arabia. But PSG accepting the offer was never going to be the issue, unless you want to get into the Middle Eastern political angle of Qatar selling to Saudi Arabia (and, frankly, I don’t wanna). Their giving him permission to speak to them is categorically neither a shock nor dramatic. £259m is an FFP-busting amount of money.
The amounts of money concerned are nosebleed-inducing. A world-record €200m-a-year salary, potentially rising as high as €700m a year with commercial arrangements and image rights. On top of what he’s already worth, it would push Mbappe close to being a billionaire at 25 years old. And no, nobody needs that amount of money, but it's pull to others should be obvious.
But will Mbappe accept? The sweeteners in the deal reportedly offered to him suggest that the Saudis are plenty aware that merely throwing sackfuls of money at him will not be enough to lure him alone. They’ve also offered him the opportunity to leave for Real Madrid after a year should he still wish to, and it’s at this point that the extent to which it suits all parties becomes crystal clear. PSG receive a vast amount of money, which they don’t necessarily need but which tilts the FFP balance sheet back in their favour. Real Madrid get their player on a free in a year’s time, and definitely, this time.
And as for Mbappe, well, he gets out of a relationship with PSG that is clearly souring fast, the opportunity to dump Cristiano Ronaldo on his backside, more money than it can ever be good for someone to earn, a year in the sun, and a more sedate pace of football (it doesn’t seem unreasonable to presume that the Saudi Pro League AFC Champions League play at a substantially slower tempo that Ligue Un and the Champions League), making him less likely to pick up a Bernabeu-hampering injury next season.
The alternative is staying at an increasingly grumpy PSG for a year, on less money, facing a Ligue Un ‘challenge’ that he’s seen half a dozen times already, and with the fans on his back every game, regardless of the result. They get dumped out of the Champions League yet again and everyone laughs at them. They win Ligue Un yet again, only to find there’s no praise for this because PSG’s previous spending has so distorted the league in previous years that it’s barely even a competition any more. He’s seen this script before. He gets to give this circus a swerve for a year, relax a little while playing lightly competitive football, and then sign an enormo-contract with Madrid? Harry Kane must have been wishing he’d thought of it first. His brother may be on the phone to the Saudi embassy in London as I type these words. (I do not recommend accepting an invitation to visit there, certainly not if you’ve been critical of them in the past.)
And yet, and yet. There are reasons that could yet change the equation. Legacy does matter a lot to players, and although it is widely reported that Mbappe grew up ‘dreaming’ of playing for Real Madrid, he was born in Paris and it would be understandable if he didn’t wish to leave the club under a cloud. His relationship with the club’s hierarchy may have crumbled to a point at which they omitted him from their pre-season summer tour–a bold statement, considering the extent to which he’s their money-maker on the international circuit–but they won’t be so daft as to leave him out of the first team once the league season starts, should he still be there. The challenge of one last shot at the Champions League with PSG and leaving on a high–which may have been his hope from the outset–may yet still appeal to him.
Insofar as going to Saudi Arabia is concerned, even if Mbappe couldn’t care less about the human rights issues surrounding the country (and honestly, has there ever been any suggestion whatsoever that he might be?), he may be concerned with damage to his broader reputation for going to this particular country at this point in his career. There may be solid, logical reasons why going there would make sense for his longer-term plan, but those who point and laugh at him for accepting the money during what should be one of his peak years won’t care about such details. If that is a nagging doubt for him, it’s possible that no amount of financial balm may ameliorate it.
What do Saudi Arabia get out of it? Why spend so much money on signing a player with the explicit admission that this would be a deal that falls somewhere between a conventional transfer and a year-long loan? As we all already know, this is not the only extreme offer they’ve made this summer. N’golo Kante, for example, has been a wonderful player for both Leicester City and Chelsea, but he only played 33 Premier League games in the last two seasons and had been showing signs of wear and tear for longer. Offering multiple times what a player is already earning makes little enough sense in its own right–one hundred million Euros a year just feels like a number pulled out of the air–but it makes even less to do so for a player that there are few guarantees that will be able to play anything like a full season.
As ever with Saudi Arabia, the flex is the point. They can step into the heart of European club football and take one of its most-prized assets, should they wish. It’s clearly the message they’re intending to send, because why else would they act in the way in which they have? Why else would they have been offering multiple times what players are already earning? We should recognise that money ceases to have a value when you have the amount of it that the Saudis have at their disposal. To that extent, even Kylian Mbappe is really just another pawn in a far bigger game.