According to the established scriptwriting lore there are only seven types of story. Three of those are: the quest, the tragedy, the voyage and return. These are the archetypes that have sustained the human desire for narrative, from myth and folk tales to the plots of Hollywood blockbusters.
Look a little closer, of course, and this orthodoxy has exploded in the past few years. To these seven storytelling tropes must be added an eighth, a story so grand, so relentless that the other seven are, with apologies to overcoming the monster and rags to riches, starting to look a little thin.
Welcome to the latest instalment of Kylian Mbappé possibly moving to Real Madrid, the greatest football transfer story ever told, a saga that seems to find new layers of richness and texture with each retelling.
The latest update from the Mbappé-verse kicked off on Monday with news that a letter had been delivered to Paris Saint-Germain’s offices stating that the club’s star asset would not be taking up the option to extend his contract. This leaves the club with three options: stand idle as Mbappé leaves for free in a year’s time; offer a new and ever more ludicrous deal; or put him up for sale in this summer. The first two aren’t really viable options. The third now looks the most likely.
Just an everyday tale of superstar footballing folk, you might think. But like any bardic story cycle it is the richness of the detail that matters. Mbappé’s letter follows last summer’s renegotiation whereby he was offered profound and frankly quite weird levels of influence in club affairs. This was followed by what Mbappé historians are calling The October Crisis, when that promised new status turned out to be a disappointment and the Mbappé industrial complex began once again to make noises of unhappiness, threat, departure.
PSG’s Qatari owners are said to have reacted with “a deep anger” to the latest turn. Some reports suggest a deadline of 31 July had been agreed for a decision on this point. To reject it unilaterally, without discussion, has been taken as an act of hostility.
Mbappé tweeted a hedged statement on Tuesday afternoon stating that he was “happy” in Paris and intends to stay for next year, but this is essentially meaningless. A year is a year and Paris now have no real hand to play in negotiations with, say, Real Madrid. Instead the club’s owners find themselves in the unaccustomed position of commercial weakness, holding an asset that can now be plucked from their hands at a knockdown price. Hmm. This kind of thing never happened with liquefied petroleum gas.
There are two obvious responses to this. The first is a deep sense of boredom. Really? Still this? To date Mbappé’s most profound contribution to European club football is the annual summer mini-industry of transfer talk, the stage-managed and highly lucrative dithering over his own footballing future. And talk in this company is not cheap. Even the ambient chatter generates new deals, fresh sweeteners, economic activity for a multilayered industry of hangers-on and gossip-megaphones. By now it has all become very knowing and cynical and needlessly prolonged. In the words of one of Mbappé’s key corporate partners: just do it.
The second response is of course schadenfreude, the fascinating spectacle of seeing a club built as a kind of personality cult, an enticement to celebrity worship, finding itself hung out to dry by an empowered celebrity individualist. Mbappé is at least being true to his club culture in steamrollering off in search of a larger slice of the universe. Perhaps this is what people mean by footballing DNA.
And yet for all that, this is undeniably a significant event in European football, for reasons that stretch far beyond Mbappé’s immediate reach. There is a tree of consequences here, a macro-economic flowchart. Most obviously Mbappé leaving would supercharge the summer market for elite attackers, creating a kind of snakes and ladder board for the likes of Harry Kane and Victor Osimhen.
Mbappé to Madrid would extinguish any chance of Kane going the same way. But it might light a fire under the possibility of Kane or Marcus Rashford going to Paris. And what do Chelsea do in this situation, apart from whirling around like a dying catherine wheel machine-gunning the world with money? There will be consequences.
On a more simple level, for all the noise and the interminable plot twists – that are somehow always the same plot twist – this would still be an excellent, and much-needed move for everyone concerned.
The benefits for Madrid are obvious. There may be some alarms at the constant melodrama, hissy-fits and tension with Mbappé’s current employers, but Madrid know a little bit about planetary‑scale egomania. Come over here and tell us all about it Kylian, old bean. It looks an excellent fit in terms of position, age and energy. A Madrid team with Aurélien Tchouaméni, Eduardo Camavinga, Vinícius Júnior, Jude Bellingham and Mbappé as the razor edge look ready to run the world into the ground for the next five years. Plus there are vibe-based benefits, too. To sign Mbappé from PSG, and to do it this way, would feel like a win for the cartel, for the theatre of Madridismo, the old world against the carbon parvenus. Who knows, maybe we won’t need the Super League any more.
It would obviously be good for Mbappé, who cannot be considered the greatest player in the world or indeed the final expression of his own luminous talent while he continues to bask in Paris. Time to move, to test those limits.
Plus for all the outrage at losing their most prized trinket, this might just be a tonic for PSG, who are no closer to winning the Champions League than they were before Mbappé arrived in 2017. Instead those years have brought something else, a state of high-powered stasis, glitzy decay. Has there been a more grotesque imitation of an actual functioning sporting institution? No football club has ever had so much influence on the economics of football, while offering so little. It has been the most inane and destructive of eras, a nadir of nation-state propaganda-ball.
Paris is one of the great talent factories of world football. With these combined resources the PSG of the last 15 years could have been Ajax of the 1970s, or peak-era La Masia. Instead we have this, a deeply cynical PR play that has normalised obscene expenditure and robbed the sport of the best years of some of its finest, most uplifting talents.
There is at least some pleasure to be taken in seeing the billionaire overclass disempowered by Mbappé’s wranglings, in seeing a player take control of his own destiny. But this is by now blurred by the sense of unhappiness and dysfunctional relationships, of a club that has become for all its wealth and noise, a fundamentally miserable place. Time to put an end to this story cycle; and to test the outer limits of that extraordinary talent in earnest.
