Our transfer offer won’t be there forever, Real Madrid warn Kylian Mbappé

PSG star Kylian Mbappé has been warned that his childhood dream of playing for Real Madrid will remain forever unfulfilled should he backtrack on an informal agreement to join the Spanish club this summer. 

The warning follows Paris Saint-Germain’s latest attempt to retain Mbappé’s services – an offer of a short-term contract that far exceeds the financial terms available at Madrid.

PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi and sporting director Leonardo are acting under instruction from Qatar to keep Mbappé at the Ligue 1 leaders beyond this winter’s World Cup, allowing the Middle East state to have the Frenchman, Lionel Messi and Neymar under club contract when it hosts the region’s first finals.

As Mbappé has rejected a series of proposals to replace a contract that expires in June with a new five-year deal that would ultimately pay him more than his two superstar teammates, PSG are now offering a two-year agreement that would only commit the forward to Paris until the age of 25.

In addition to the abbreviated terms, high-level political persuasion has been deployed in the attempt to persuade Mbappé to remain in France.

Mbappé’s childhood dream is to play for Real but the Spanish side will divert their attention elsewhere if he signs a new contract for PSG.

According to a source close to the player, two French presidents — Emmanuel Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy — have intervened to encourage Mbappé to stay at PSG. 

The latter was president of France when Qatar won the vote to host the 2022 World Cup, with the former Fifa president Sepp Blatter subsequently stating that Sarkozy’s “political intervention . . . tipped the balance in favour of Qatar and against the USA”.

Florentino Pérez has invested a huge amount of his own political capital in a long-standing effort to make Mbappé the centre point of a team that he expects to bring multiple European and domestic titles to a remodelled Santiago Bernabéu.

With the France international’s agreement to join Madrid already in place, Madrid’s president made three transfer-fee offers to PSG in the final week of last summer’s transfer window.

With Mbappé having only one year remaining on his PSG contract, and what he thought was a gentleman’s agreement that he would be permitted to leave in 2021, Madrid opened with an offer of €160 million (currently £133.3 million), ultimately raising their bid to €200 million.

Though that unprecedented sum was intended as “a mark of respect to PSG”, the Qatar-owned club refused to even reply to the last offer.

After the two clubs were drawn against each other in the Champions League’s round of 16, Madrid agreed a strategy with Mbappé that they would not make any further offers this January, allowing the player to concentrate on performing on the football field.

Before Mbappé decided Tuesday’s first leg with his 22nd club goal of the season, Al-Khelaifi told French television that “I’m not going to hide it, we barely have any relationship with Real Madrid”.

Madrid’s confidence in signing Mbappé has been damaged by PSG’s revised negotiation tactics.

Pérez has made it clear that the opportunity to join a club Mbappé has supported since childhood is not one that can be postponed indefinitely, and that money earmarked for his transfer will be redirected to adding other elite talents to the planned co-acquisition of Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund should the Frenchman sign a new deal at PSG.

Mbappé said: “I have a quiet relationship with money. I know it’s important, I’m happy to have it, but that’s not what drives me every second of every day. It’s life experience that counts, more than making money, even if that’s important because we have families to look after. Above all, I thirst for discoveries, travel, meeting other players, different cultures.”