What do you get if you cross Kylian Mbappé with Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Love Island, Jeremy+Corbyn+hot+leaked+pics and What Is Wrong With My Thumbs? It’s hard to say for sure. But thanks to the hive-mind thought-invasion robots of the internet you are at least now reading this article about the brilliant, wonderful Mbappé and the most interminable, clickbait-heavy transfer story of football’s great summer of money.
Most things don’t happen. Often football transfer talk is a kind of currency in itself, a semi-detached entity, enough to lubricate the cogs, push related deals along and keep the wider industry whirring along on its own hot air. When it comes to Mbappé, however, things do seem to be moving finally.
This week the outer circles of the Mbappé industrial complex have let it be known Kylian and his dad, Wilfried, are dismayed at so many talented young players leaving Monaco this summer, a situation that can only be remedied, it seems, by leaving Monaco this summer.
Those who know say Manchester City may still have some play in this game. Somewhere in a small sealed darkened room with the radio playing gently Arsène Wenger is “still hopeful” of signing the most coveted young talent in world football. In reality the most likely destination appears to be Real Madrid. The suggestion is the champions of Europe may be ready to pay a world-record £160m fee, a move that would qualify as not only the largest but also the most extraordinary football transfer of all time.
It is easy to lose your sense of double-take in football. In another intersecting narrative arc Neymar is currently circling closer to signing for Paris Saint-Germain in return for a wheelbarrow full of moon rock and five billion ladybird wings, a move that would rip up all previous points of transfer-record reference, meaningless money from a world beyond sport, deployed to transform a lovely little high-grade footballer made of sherbet and straw and sugar frosting into an instrument of geopolitical will-to-power.
Neymar’s elevation to uber-stardom is at least a variation on a familiar theme. Mbappé to Madrid, on the other hand, would be a departure from even the most overheated industry norms. For all Mbappé’s vast social media imprint, his status as a kind of Snapchat footballer, a viral skill-meme made flesh, it is worth remembering that he really hasn’t done anything yet. He is for now all potential energy; all cold, pure, untarnished talent. In total Mbappé has played 39 hours of league and European football. He’s 18 and a half years old. His proposed transfer fee would be more than Madrid’s combined outlay on Cristiano Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane, both of whom were already world player of the year winners and in their 20s when they signed.
It is easy simply to shrug and talk about inflation but this is still something new. In another age this transfer simply would not have happened, would at least have been delayed or left to stew quietly. Thrillingly talented teenagers have always been a part of sport. The difference here is that a year and a half into his professional career Mbappé is not only a very good young player, he has his own disorientating gravity as a global celebrity, a marketing bonanza, a brand statement of corporate good health, a talent too urgently vital to be left to steep and bloom in its own time.
The lesson of Monaco this summer is that the speed at which an elite team is assembled and then torn apart has been accelerated to hyper-speed and that the rewards of developing talent are now financial and transactional. At the end of which Mbappé is simply too good and too hot to be left alone. The potential cost of failing to buy him, of failing to monetise his talent right now is too great. Money will not allow this to happen.
There are a couple of things worth saying about this. Despite the instinct to recoil at such excess, to fear for Mbappé’s development, history suggests this may actually work out. There is, if not quite a method here, then a consistent approach. Real Madrid have already racked up six of the top 18 transfer deals of all time. Only one of these, James Rodríguez, has been a failure. Madrid have broken the world transfer record five times in the past 17 years and on each occasion it’s been worth it: Luis Figo, Zidane, Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale. This is an unassailable playing supremacy, the history of a modern super club pegged out in big-ticket signings.
And perhaps against all expectations it turns out world record transfers generally do work out. The eye is drawn to the odd ones. Denilson has become a cautionary tale, a floaty, fun, endlessly jinking winger signed by a temporarily insane Real Betis for a world record £21.5m. Gianluigi Lentini’s £13m move to Milan gets a bad rap but Lentini never fully recovered from a terrible car crash, and even then did quite well while he still could.
Otherwise the lesson is that stellar talent will rise towards the light, from David Jack of Arsenal, signed bythe teetotal Herbert Chapman in a gin-soaked sting over a late night with the directors of Bolton Wanderers, right through to the modern roll call of men with names such as Cruyff, Maradona, Gullit, Shearer and Baggio.
The difference is that Madrid are spending on promise this time, on an idea; and ideas are delicate, fragile things. As ever this is likely to come down to simple talent, the possibility that the early signs are correct and that Mbappé really is a genuine outlier, able to carry along on his back this extraordinary new superheated nexus between talent and high commerce.
Mbappé and money: it’s an old story of talent and the lust for talent, the obsession with possibilities and potential, expressed in machine form in that ludicrous price tag. And felt in more personal terms in our own desire – can you feel it, too? – to see this whole enterprise succeed, for Mbappé to be the real thing, the once and future Mbappé, to follow the path already set for him. Football’s summer window may seem increasingly incredible, an inanity of greed and skewed values. But it feeds on the purity of this obsession, on the desire above all for stories to come true, for promise and talent and youth to bloom under our unblinking gaze.
