Europe, several years from now. A thin light strains through the cracked and grimy window. The air is gritty with smoke. The man wakes. He is stiff, cold, tired, afraid. Outside is devastation, the city in ruins. Everyone has fled. Even the sirens sound more distant now. With a trembling hand, the man withdraws his phone from his pocket. He must be sparing with the battery, he knows, but awkwardly he turns it on.
Perhaps this morning there will be signal. Perhaps this morning he will find out how far the crisis extends. The screen flickers. He hears the low ping before he sees the bars. A miracle. He has connection. There is a news alert. His fingers tremble as he taps. For a moment his weary eye can not quite take in the headline he sees. But then it shudders into focus: “Mbappé,” it says, “threatens to quit PSG.” Some things, at least, never change.
What, really, did Paris Saint‑Germain think was going to happen when Kylian Mbappé got to the final year of his contract? Did they really believe a player who two years ago in effect made them buy him for a second time despite never having left was going to toddle along to Nasser al-Khelaifi’s office and cheerily sign an extension? “Cheers, Nass, whatever you think. Franchement, I love it so much I’d play for free. Merci.”
Lionel Messi has gone. Neymar seems to be on his way, flirting with all the usual money-spouts, but particularly the Saudi club Al-Hilal and Chelsea. Mbappé is the last remaining star. Unless PSG have had some improbable epiphany and realised at last that egotistical monsters may improve the guest list but are pretty much useless when to comes to winning things that matter, he is in a position of immense power.
Of course he is going to use it: one recent senior PSG employee said of the fabled front three that Neymar was the easiest to deal with. That’s the Neymar who had the three-day birthday party, the Neymar who seems always to manage to attend Carnaval in Rio, the Neymar whose noisy parties in Bougival have been described by the local mayor as “prodigiously annoying”. And Mbappé is more difficult than that.
If anybody is still watching this increasingly tawdry sport in a couple of decades, studies in how the petro-clubs have spent their cash will surely focus on the contrast between the coordinated industry of Manchester City and, it appears, Newcastle, and the extravagant splurges of PSG. If PSG were a football club, they would use this as an opportunity, take all that money they are saving in wages and invest it in developing the immense talent of the Parisian banlieues, making this a true club of the city rather than a honeypot for glamorous hangers-on.
Yet to blame Mbappé feels absurd. He is not the petro-state that has unbalanced football, inflating the market with breaches of financial fair play regulations. He is, in his own way, a victim in this. He is a player of extraordinary gifts and they are being wasted. It’s not so much that his 148 league goals over the past six seasons in Ligue 1 feel worthless – although it is partly that, for surely the best want to test themselves against the best, rather than, say, relegated Ajaccio, whose entire squad take nine weeks to earn between them what Mbappé earns in one.
It’s that he is not extending himself in other ways. In certain respects, Mbappé had an excellent World Cup. He won the Golden Boot, scoring eight goals, including a hat-trick in the final. That second strike against Argentina, the one-two with Marcus Thuram followed by the perfect low volley, was a goal of exceptional quality at a moment of the highest pressure.
But between his stoppage-time goal against Poland in the last 16 and converting the first penalty 80 minutes into the final, he did almost nothing. In the semi-final and the final, his lack of defensive work meant he had to be moved off the left flank because he wasn’t tracking the opposing right-back. He didn’t make a tackle or interception in the entire World Cup.
Perhaps at international level, where the game is less cohesive, less dependent on mutually supportive interactions, that is just about manageable. Messi’s participation in games was equally fitful – but Messi is 35 and time has long since caught up with him; Mbappé is 24.
Messi played at club level for years in unbalanced sides. The reason Barcelona started losing Champions League ties by large margins after 2015 was a slow midfield exposed by a distant and ageing forward line; they were fine so long as they dominated possession, but vulnerable as soon as they didn’t.
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PSG’s habitual pratfalls in Europe have a similar basis; one former coach has spoken of how he laid out his tactical plan for a major Champions League tie only for a senior player to protest that it seemed to involve a lot of running.
In La Liga, Mbappé might get away with ignoring his defensive responsibilities – he probably would still score 25+ goals a season at Real Madrid as standard and his ability is such he would still cause problems for Champions League opponents. But if he maintained his determination to play on the left, what would that mean for Vinícius Júnior, who has excelled this season? Mbappé might be an upgrade in terms of profile and star quality, but it’s not at all clear he would make Madrid any better as a team – and he would cost an awful lot more.
Florentino Pérez, with his love of celebrity, would almost certainly welcome Mbappé to Madrid. After so many previous attempts, he may see landing him as the resolution of a quest. But it’s possible this whole scenario is just another negotiating tactic on Mbappé’s part. Either way, yet another round of squabbling about which superclub gets to pay the superstar lots of money feels deeply wearisome. Is this why the Victorians codified the game? Is this the sport we played in the schoolyard?
Perhaps for football the apocalypse is here already and one of its victims is Mbappé’s talent. He is brilliant, but he could be so much better.