Could Liverpool Afford Kylian Mbappe For €200 million? Wages, Transfer Fee

Despite signing a new agreement with PSG last summer, Kylian Mbappe has been linked with a move away.

It’s been a while, but the link between Kylian Mbappe and Liverpool has been revived.

Over the previous few years, anytime rumours of Mbappe leaving Paris Saint-Germain have surfaced, you can virtually assume that the Reds will be named as potential suitors shortly after, no matter how improbable such a move may seem.

The links between Mbappe and the Reds have long been documented, with Mbappe admitting that his mother’s favorite team is Liverpool and Reds boss Jurgen Klopp’s public praise for the 24-year-old’s talents having seen Anfield mentioned as a potential destination for some time now.

Those rumors were seemingly put to rest earlier in 2022, when Mbappe, who had been embroiled in some absurd cat-and-mouse game with Real Madrid, pledged his future to PSG. All it needed was a €50 million (£43.7 million) monthly salary, a rumoured €100 million signing bonus, total ownership of his image rights, and the participation of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Mbappe’s previous deal at PSG had been due to expire in the summer of 2022 and after a lengthy PR strategy from both sides had been expected to sign for Real Madrid. The Spanish side had offered as much as €200m for his services with just months remaining on his deal, an offer PSG flatly refused.

Much to the chagrin of Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, a man keen to bring the era of the ‘Galactico’ back to the Spanish capital, Mbappe chose to remain in France.

But Mbappe and PSG are no longer in a happy marriage and talk of his exit remains dominant. The forward reportedly wants to leave Paris, but Nasser Al-Khelaifi, PSG chairman and chairman of the owners of the club, Qatar Sports Investments, is ready to play hardball with his club’s star player, vowing earlier this week at the unveiling of Luis Enrique as PSG boss that it would be “impossible” for him to leave on a free transfer at the end of next season.

This new development has set pulses racing and it was claimed on Thursday by Spanish journalist Edu Aguirre of popular show El Chiringuito that Liverpool had made a bid of €200m for Mbappe. As with the previous attempts to link Liverpool with a move for the French international, it seems far-fetched, not least as it appears almost set in stone that Real Madrid will try to be his next destination, something that the Spanish media would dearly love to see. Hamming up the potential transfer interest in a player by other clubs, when it might not be rooted in reality, wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility.

With a number of major European clubs on the UEFA ‘watchlist’ when it comes to potential Financial Fair Play breaches, signing Mbappe is something completely off the table for some. Liverpool, with a large amount of headroom when it comes to FFP due to their more austere approach to transfer spend, are one of the clubs that, theoretically, could afford to extricate the Frenchman from the Parc des Princes. However, the theory and the reality are not the same.

The narrative around Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group among some sections of the Reds fan base has been that they are far tighter with the purse strings than the owners at rival clubs. Player trading has long been used to help offset transfer spending while wages, while they have grown significantly under FSG’s tenure, remain at around 60 to 65 per cent of revenue, well below the recommended UEFA limit of 70 per cent.

The Reds broke their transfer record with the signing of Darwin Nunez from Benfica last summer, a deal that could rise to as much as £85m. In order to land a player like Mbappe the fee required has been reported to be between £250m and £300m. That is world record-breaking stuff, the kind of sums that have so grotesquely distorted the transfer market and contributed to the enormous gulf that now exists between the biggest clubs and the rest.

But say that FSG gives that the green light and presses on to the next phase, the small matter of his reported wages of around £800,000 per week – more than double what Mohamed Salah’s new deal has been reported to be worth, would take things into the farcical. How would sums like that be squared with existing members, those wanting to renew, and new signings? Amortised, the transfer cost over six years at £300m would stand at £50m, the annual sum that Liverpool gets from their most lucrative guaranteed commercial deal, the front-of-shirt sponsorship from Standard Chartered.

But we’ll carry on. That’s been agreed. We’re all there now. Oh, there is the not so insignificant matter of the fact that PSG, backed by the almost limitless wealth of Qatar Sports Investments, agreed to allow Mbappe 100 per cent control over his image rights. Mbappe’s image rights issue reared its head last year with the French national side when he refused to endorse certain sponsors when on international duty.

The value of commercial deals for clubs like Liverpool is vast and part of that value is that companies get to use players on occasion for promotional activity. If Mbappe has the ability to simply refuse to endorse certain sponsorships then that then affects the potential value, especially if there is no value to be had in tapping into the most marketable player a team could have.