Real Madrid wanted to sign Kylian Mbappe SEVEN years ago & finally they get him
Real Madrid’s pursuit of Kylian Mbappe started so long ago, his soon to be new team-mate Jude Bellingham was still at school when the first offer was made.
It was July 2017 and Bellingham was a 14-year-old (already playing for Birmingham’s under-18s).
Mbappe was an 18-year-old sensation who had just taken Monaco to the semi-finals of the Champions League scoring six goals en-route.
Madrid president Florentino Perez and the club’s chief executive Jose Angel Sanchez knew he was the man to eventually replace Cristiano Ronaldo.
What they didn’t know was that they would have to wait seven years to sign him.
Marca’s deputy editor Carlos Carpio, who has now confirmed that Mbappe has agreed a five-year deal, reported a bid of €180m (£154m) back in 2017. It was a stratospheric fee and Monaco owner Dimitri Rybolovlev seemed happy for Mbappe to join the Spanish club.
But Madrid were only offering €7m (£6m) net a season to the player and Paris Saint-Germain were willing and able to pay him more than double that in wages.
They were also able to come to an agreement with Monaco to take the player on loan for a season and buy him the following year. That helped them swerve the financial fair play police monitoring them because they had just bought Neymar from Barcelona for €222m (£190m).
Madrid had been banking on the fact that Mbappe used to have posters of Cristiano Ronaldo on his bedroom wall as a kid, and that another one of his idols Zinedine Zidane was their coach. What no one fully grasped then was that Mbappe and his mother Fayza Lamari were not sentimentalists – they went where the money was.
PSG had the bottomless pit of cash and various ways of evading attempts to limit them spending it. Real Madrid consoled themselves with the
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