It was at the unveiling of yet another new coach that Paris Saint-Germain’s president made his first public statement on the future of his team’s best player. He did not equivocate and left little room for compromise.
Kylian Mbappé, the marquee 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 pronouncements from the new coach, Spaniard Luis Enrique, but eager to hear what the club planned to do about the uncertainty created by Mbappé after his public declaration last month that he wished to move on after next season.
Such a scenario would leave 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 would not be allowed to happen.
“We do not 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 needs to sign a new contract.
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“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 stood to leave the raised platform he had shared with Enrique, told the assembled members of the news media that he expected they had got what they came for. The new coach, for his part, declined to say whether he expected Mbappé to be in Paris when the new season gets under way this summer.
What is clear is that for a second straight summer, the fate of where Mbappé plays is going to overshadow PSG’s efforts to prove that it is now a serious contender for soccer’s biggest prize rather than once again the central stage for the sport’s biggest intrigues.
Enrique, who most recently coached Spain’s national team, arrived on Wednesday and is charged with bringing order to a club that has been characterised by disorder in recent seasons. Just this week, his predecessor, Christophe Galtier, who arrived just last summer, became the latest PSG coach to be shown the door before completing his contract.
No club in soccer has spent more money on talent since Qatar Sports Investments acquired PSG about a decade ago. Few top clubs have cycled through as many coaches, and fewer still have wasted as much time and money trying to find an identity and a style underpinning all that largesse.
Last summer, PSG persuaded Mbappé to sign a new contract rather than sign with Real Madrid, the club 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 mostly young, mostly French talent. Without him, that master plan would once again require reimagining.
Later on, al-Khelaifi was even more strident. Sitting down with members of the domestic news media, he said Mbappé had a “maximum” of 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. Mbappé could, it was pointed out to al-Khelaifi, just decide to stay, making it impossible for the club to dictate his fate.
Al-Khelaifi said that would be unthinkable – that Mbappé would be breaking an unwritten convention of some sort, by doing something that the world’s best players simply do not do. He did not mention that PSG had done that very thing two summers ago, signing Argentinian great Lionel Messi as a free agent when Barcelona, the team Messi had played on for his entire career, could no longer afford to keep him.
“If he doesn’t want to sign,” al-Khelaifi said, “the door is open.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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