THE GUARDIAN
And so, at last, it ends. The longest-running transfer saga anyone could remember and no one was allowed to forget has finally reached its inevitable, overdue conclusion. The game’s, the world’s, worst-kept secret is out. Kylian Mbappé has joined Real Madrid. Yep. Shocking, isn’t it? Actually, for everyone else, it probably is. “He would take us to the next level,” Jude Bellingham said on Saturday night. While standing on the Wembley pitch. Having just won the Champions League. His team’s sixth in a decade.
The continent’s best club now has its best player. The signing, on a free transfer from Paris Saint-Germain, was announced on Monday evening, just as Mbappé had told Emmanuel Macron it would be, cameras catching him that morning saying: “Ce soir, ce soir.” The scene felt appropriate somehow. His signing took seven years and became a question of state – of states– but it is done now. No false alarms, no jumping the gun, no “official” that isn’t official and no U-turns, not this time: it is 2024 and done is done. Now for that other bit which can feel secondary sometimes: the football.
It is time. There is a photo you will have seen often. In it, a young Mbappé lies on his bed at home gazing up at the posters of Cristiano Ronaldo on his wall. There are others of him from a little later, aged 14, although he still looks small, not least because this time he is standing next to his idol. He would be big one day, though, and they knew that already, which is why Mbappé had been invited to Valdebebas to train. They had to convince him as much as the other way round, so Zinedine Zidane had picked him up from the airport. In the car, nervous, he had asked if he should take his shoes off.
Identified early as the man, the kid, most likely to lead the next generation, Madrid had always wanted Mbappé to come and he had always wanted to go, too. His was a managed career from the beginning, the idea always that he would end up at the Santiago Bernabéu. Everything else over the past half a dozen years, the occasional rumours about other clubs, the presidents who claimed it was possible, was just white noise: lines to be laughed at, empty links to be clicked. Madrid was a question of when; what few expected was for that to be now.
Madrid had wanted him as a child – his family had wanted to find the best place for him and protect him from the pressure, which was already intense – and when he left Monaco for PSG on a €180m deal that was officially a loan first in 2017. Mbappé, though, had doubted that he had a place in the team with the BBC of Gareth Bale, Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo around, unsure about moving to Spain just yet. Paris was home, a place where he could mature and achieve. The biggest objective of all, the Champions League, went unfulfilled in the end.
Madrid were not in that much of a hurry either. They had Bale, Benzema and Ronaldo. They had just won their second European Cup in a row, the first team to do so in the Champions League era. And Mbappé was still a teenager, with time on his side and theirs. He wasn’t going to be at PSG for long; let him mature a little there, play. Stay in touch. He knew and they knew that he would go one day soon.
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