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Liverpool Echo

Sport

Dave Powell

Kylian Mbappe picture clear for Liverpool after FSG investor predicts transfer 'arms race'

Liverpool Kylian Mbappe FSG Gerry Cardinale Jurgen Klopp ESL AC Milan Behdad Eghbali Chelsea Todd Boehly

Kylian Mbappe, his future and his wages are seldom out of the headlines.

Having been rather ambitiously linked with Liverpool several times in recent seasons, as recently as this month when it was claimed that he wanted to leave Paris Saint-Germain just months after rejecting the advances of Real Madrid, a development that would have put a limited number of teams on red alert.

Liverpool were likely not among those teams watching with interest, with the financials to prise Mbappe away from the French capital simply to great for it to make any kind of economic sense, especially with the pressing need to invest in the squad over the next two transfer windows to avert a potential crisis and to keep them challenging at the summit of the Premier League after what has been a tough start to the current campaign.

This week saw respected French newspaper Le Parisien report that Mbappe was in possession of the largest contract in football history, €630m (£546m) over the coming seasons. It is a claim that has been rejected by PSG themselves.

"Following a sensationalist media story published overnight regarding the Club and one of its players, Paris Saint-Germain confirms the story is completely wrong with not a single detail being correct," a PSG statement read.

While there may be an argument over the exact figures there can be little doubt that Mbappe's financial package is one of the biggest in football, and in an era where Erling Haaland has been reported to be earning close on £900,000 per week when all bonuses and add-ons are considered, it is a transfer market that is now into new territory.

Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group have faced criticism, amplified by the club's poor start to the season, over a lack of investment in the first team, especially in comparison with the likes of Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea.

Liverpool are one of the few clubs to have remained fairly robust during the pandemic, their greater control over costs, more conservative spend and long-established football strategy, headed by Jurgen Klopp, allowing them to weather the storm and continue to grow.

But while last season saw them come within a whisker of achieving an unprecedented quadruple, the club have regressed this season, a combination of injuries, a loss of form and a perceived lack of investment in key areas, most notably in midfield.

As the biggest clubs and the loosest spenders continue to inflate the transfer market, Gerry Cardinale, the founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, the US firm that owns 11 per cent of FSG and that bought a controlling stake in AC Milan during the summer, believes that there is an 'arms race' for players taking place.

Speaking at the Sportico Invest in Sports conference in New York, Cardinale, whose RedBird firm paid $750m for the stake in FSG in March 2021, said: "In Europe the public/private partnership demands that you deliver for your public partner, which are the fans, and all they care about is winning. That model, with no salary cap and the transfer market, has led to a phenomenon where everyone is deficit financing this and it is an arms race for players.

"I think we can accomplish both and I think there can be a new form of ownership which monetises intellectual property in the form of a Disney type company where you have the 360-degree flywheel of monetising that, hub and spoke, and that cash flow generation, if you do it right, can go back into a very smart way of putting a value proposition on the field."

Cardinale, whose investment into FSG arrived just ahead of the botched attempt by Liverpool and 11 other European clubs to launch a breakaway European Super League competition, also gave his take on the current state of play with the ESL and whether reform of some kind was needed.

Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan and AC Milan all removed themselves from the discussions in the fallout in April 2021, although Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus remain espoused to the idea and have even moved to appoint a new CEO to the ESL holding company, A22, as they continue their legal fight with UEFA in the European Court of Justice.

Liverpool reaffirmed their stance last week that their position had not changed on the ESL and that they would not be engaging with the project in the future.

AC Milan's involvement occurred more than a year prior to RedBird's acquisition of the club. Cardinale, while not a supporter of the ESL idea, did acknowledge that some kind of reform had to occur, if only to address the imbalance that exists between the Premier League and the rest of Europe.

Speaking to the ECHO at the Sportico conference, Cardinale said: "The challenge for the leagues is that the teams have become so valuable that they have almost gotten away from the leagues. People need to step back at a league level and if you think that these teams are mini-Disneys then look at the leagues and say 'what is the relationship between the leagues and teams?'

"In the US those guys have been pretty good at that but I would say that, globally, the teams have gotten away from the leagues. It is instructive to acknowledge the reasons why (the Super League attempt) happened and what are we going to do about it. We can hit that in different ways, it doesn't have to be through a European Super League."

Chelsea co-owner and Clearlake Capital co-founder Behdad Eghbali, who acquired the club in an initial £2.5bn deal with Todd Boehly earlier this year, was also dismissive of the ESL, but agreeing that there had to be some element of structural reform.

Eghbali told the ECHO: "I think the sport needs more premium high quality matches and content but it doesn't have to be a Super League.

"Todd [Boehly] went there on an All-Star Game, the baseball talent competition or draft generates £200million to £300million of revenue on a Monday or Tuesday each year, none of that exists in the EPL. Could there be an EPL versus Serie A game? Could you see pre-season matches producing more premium content on the pitch? You could.

"But structurally, given how botched that episode was does anybody have any appetite for something like that? A couple of teams in Spain do and they are vocal about it, but everyone else doesn't want to go there anymore."