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Real Madrid will have to wait another year to sign Mbappé

AFP

Real Madrid

Florentino Pérez even offered 200 million to hire another galactic ‘in extremis’, but PSG remained firm and assumed the risk that one of its stars will leave for free next year

Ignacio Only

The countdown ended, a frenzied market closed and there was no white smoke for the galactic signing of Kylian Mbappé for Real Madrid. There will be no more waiting because the last offer from Florentino Pérez did not open the bolt imposed by the emir Al-Thani and the magnate Al-Khelaifi at PSG, a club-state that has the money for punishment and that prefers to keep a star even to risk that the next campaign can go free.

Although it slipped late on Monday that Real Madrid was withdrawing from the negotiations, the matter remained latent until the end. In the late afternoon of this Tuesday, Sky reported that the top Madrid president, already desperate, put on the table up to 220 million including bonuses. But the top officials of PSG did not even respond. They wanted to have Mbappé this course with Leo Messi and Neymar Jr.

The French star, concentrated with the French team in Strasbourg, where this Wednesday the team of Didier Deschamps meets Bosnia-Herzegovina in a clash qualifying for the Qatar 2022 World Cup, does not fulfill the dream of joining the most successful club in the world and you will have to reprogram it. Mbappé has not made any public bad gesture to his club, but he has transferred Leonardo, the sports director of PSG, that either they reached an agreement for his transfer in this market or on January 1, 2022 he will be free and he will fly free towards the Santiago Bernabéu next summer.

According to Le Parisien, in the last hours Mbappé rejected an offer of 45 million net per year to renew and today he is clear that he will go to Real Madrid. But football is very changeable, the petrodollars will not stop trying to seduce him and that is why Florentino wanted to close the operation now and avoid possible future problems.

Real Madrid had always had it very difficult to sign Mbappé now, almost in Chinese, but he gave off a certain tranquility until the end. He was confident in the ability demonstrated by his top president over 18 years to close large operations almost on the horn. But time was playing against him and also against PSG giving his arm to twist. In a club with so much economic power, it would be unthinkable for him to receive a substantial amount of money for his star and stand idly by. And in a seen and unseen, the signing of Erling Haaland with Borussia Dortmund and agent Mino Raiola as negotiators is not undertaken.

The ending is very different, but the ‘Mbappé operation’ bore similarities to the signing of Ronaldo Nazario in 2002. Then, after weeks of tough negotiations, Real Madrid issued a statement explaining that the “existence of insurmountable differences with Inter” and that it was renouncing this contract. The strategy worked for him and with five minutes before the registration period expired, the whites announced the arrival of the Brazilian galactic in exchange for 45 million. The difference is that Ronaldo threatened the Lombard club with declaring itself in absentia and Mbappé has not gone to that extreme.

Three years later, Florentino Pérez found himself in a similar situation with Sergio Ramos and Sevilla. Half an hour after the deadline was closed, Real Madrid deposited in the headquarters of the then Professional Football League (LFP) the 27 million clause of the Seville footballer, a legend later in the white club and now, precisely, in the PSG.

Already in the second stage of Florentino Pérez in the position of president, he also stretched to the end in 2013 the complicated negotiation with Tottenham for Gareth Bale, who had declared himself in absentia. Daniel Levy, president of the London club that already tried to force the situation for the transfer of Luka Modric, closed on August 27 of the previous season, kept the pulse but surrendered in the end for just over 100 million euros.

The last time the white club carried out a negotiation until August 31, it did not end with a resounding success because the documentation for the signing of goalkeeper David de Gea, from Manchester United, arrived out of time at LaLiga. This bureaucratic error also truncated the departure of Keylor Navas to Old Trafford when everything had already been agreed for the Costa Rican to be the replacement of the Toledo in the goal of the ‘red devils’, directed at that time by Louis Van Gaal.

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