Kylian Mbappé's Near Move to Liverpool in 2017
Kylian Mbappé has finally put numbers and names to one of football’s great modern “what ifs” – just how close he came to joining Liverpool in 2017.
Back then he was Monaco’s teenage phenomenon, ripping through defences and drawing a queue of Europe’s giants to his door. Real Madrid circled. Paris Saint-Germain pushed hard. Yet in the middle of it all, Merseyside quietly became a serious option – thanks, above all, to his mother.
Anfield through a mother’s eyes
While clubs crunched numbers and drew up presentations, Mbappé’s mother went on a scouting mission of her own. She flew to Merseyside, walked the city, and slipped into Anfield to feel the place rather than just see it.
“She went to the stadium, she met the people,” Mbappé recalled in an interview with The Athletic. “She was like, ‘It’s a wonderful club, everybody’s so kind, it’s a family club, a big club.’ She went to Anfield and fell in love with it.”
Her verdict could hardly have been clearer. Every conversation came back to the same point.
“All the time we were talking. ‘What do you think, Mum?’ She’d say, ‘For me, you have to go to Liverpool.’ I said, ‘OK, OK, OK!’ because Jürgen Klopp was an amazing manager. I met him and had a wonderful relationship with him. I had big respect for him.”
Liverpool had a powerful ally in the room. They also had Klopp – and he was ready to go to extraordinary lengths.
Klopp’s pitch in the sky
The German coach has previously spoken about the elaborate operation Liverpool put together to try to land Mbappé. The forward has now filled in one of the most surreal details: a secret meeting on a luxurious five-room private jet, looping in the sky while Klopp outlined his vision.
“I remember we were on the plane and we were turning around and around in the air while he was explaining his project,” Mbappé said. “I said, ‘You don’t need to convince me. You’re Jürgen Klopp, it’s Liverpool, a great club, so of course if I’m here, I have some interest. But I have other things, other projects, that are also good.’”
The charm offensive was intense, but Mbappé knew the scale of the decision he was making.
“I said to him, ‘Whatever decision I take is going to be a good decision because we are talking about some of the biggest clubs in the world.’ It’s a funny story. But in the end I took the decision to go to PSG because for me, born and raised in Paris, there was no better feeling than to show I could be a star in my home town.”
Liverpool had emptied the playbook: a manager he admired, a club his mother adored, a personal pitch at 30,000 feet. It still wasn’t enough.
Paris over Anfield
When the dust settled, Mbappé chose home. After turning down Liverpool’s advances, he joined PSG initially on loan from Monaco, before the deal was made permanent for a staggering €180 million.
That fee set a new benchmark and framed what followed: a dominant, trophy-laden spell in the French capital, with Mbappé at the heart of almost everything PSG did domestically.
His rise was not confined to club football. On the international stage, he exploded into global superstardom at the 2018 World Cup, winning the tournament as a teenager and becoming the face of a new French generation. He then lit up the 2026 edition, surpassing Miroslav Klose and Lionel Messi to become the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer, even as France fell in the semi-finals to eventual champions Spain.
The decision to stay in France had delivered exactly what he wanted: the chance to become a star in his own city, then a global icon in his country’s colours.
The road to Real Madrid
Years later, the move that once felt inevitable finally arrived. In 2024, Mbappé left his homeland and completed his long-awaited switch to Real Madrid, closing the chapter that began with that teenage choice between Europe’s heavyweights.
Liverpool were left with a story: the private jet circling in the sky, the mother who fell for Anfield, the manager he respected but ultimately turned down.
Mbappé was left with something else – a career shaped by that one decision, and a path that ran through Paris before landing in Madrid, not through the Kop he so nearly called home.
