Kylian Mbappe benched until 2024? The story behind his wild PSG contract
French club Paris Saint Germain made headlines this morning by threatening to bench Kylian Mbappé, the best young player in the world, for the entirety of its upcoming 2023-24 season.
Why would the club hurt its own chances by refusing to field its best player? The answer lies in Mbappé's unique contract--and it's giving players more negotiating power than they've ever had before.
Mbappé has played at PSG since his teenaged World Cup breakthrough in 2018. He nearly moved to Real Madrid last summer, but the deal was scuppered in its final stages thanks to the work of PSG owners Qatar Sports Investments and French president Emmanual Macron. (Yes, that's how big of a deal Mbappé is in France: his nation's president gets involved in his transfer deals.) They worked together to offer Mbappé a frankly ridiculous deal: $4M per month, a $100M sign-on bonus, involvement in PSG's business operations and loyalty bonuses for every month he stayed on past the one-year mark.
But things didn't stay rosy for Mbappé and PSG. The 2022-23 season was a rough one, with the club crashing out of the Champions League and underperforming in France's Ligue 1. Mbappé wasn't shy about criticizing PSG, calling it "a divisive club" that had "reached its ceiling." As summer approached, PSG began entertaining offers from other clubs and preparing for Mbappé to leave.
But as the summer weeks ticked down and tensions grew, an interesting new contract tidbit was revealed: if Mbappé stayed with PSG for one more season, he'd be able to leave the club for free. No nine-figure transfer fee for PSG would be necessary; interested clubs would have to pay Mbappé's wages and nothing else. That meant that Mbappé's wages could be bigger since clubs wouldn't have to pay anything to PSG.
This put PSG into a frenzy, as it scrambled to sell Mbappé and make money while it still could. But suddenly Mbappé didn't seem so interested in moving on. He became distant and uncommunicative, refusing to even meet with delegations from other clubs. From the outside, his stance became clear.
Mbappé felt PSG had slighted and misled him in previous negotiations. He didn't just want to leave the club: he wanted to screw it.
And so Mbappé has held out, collecting loyalty bonus after loyalty bonus while refusing to play for PSG in the preseason. He has continued to reject all offers and appears willing to wait out his contract to remove PSG from future negotiations and payments. PSG are understandably livid and have threatened to block him from playing for a full calendar year if he doesn't shape up. Mbappé, in turn, seems perfectly happy to spend the 2023/4 season on vacation, collecting loyalty bonuses from a club he's actively betraying.
So yes, the rumors are true: you may not see much of Mbappé this year. But that's exactly the way he wants it. His staggering, eye-watering, athlete-friendly contract from 2022 has given him all of the power over PSG--and when he leaves in one year's time, he'll leave without them getting a penny.
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