Paris Saint-Germain had long expected Kylian Mbappe’s letter, such was his overt dissatisfaction with how everything was going, but that was emphatically not the case with the rest of Europe. Monday’s news that the French star would not be signing his one-year contract extension caused “a scramble” around the continent’s top clubs.
“Nobody was prepared for this,” one well-placed figure says. It instantly saw a number of sporting departments do a lot of investigation on Tuesday, to see if any deal might be possible. That’s the power of Mbappe, who has probably succeeded Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in becoming one player who clubs will drop everything for.
