Official: Mbappe fulfills destiny after sealing Real Madrid move
3rd June 2024
Mbappe has signed a five-year deal to move to Real Madrid from Paris Saint-Germain, the Spanish club announced on Monday.
- Mbappe had verbally agreed to move to Real in February and then announced in May he would leave PSG at the end of the season.
- He will earn $38 million (circa Ksh 5 billion) a season, according to reports in Spain.
- Mbappe scored a club record 256 goals for PSG since joining the Qatar-owned club from Monaco on an initial loan in 2017.
The first time Real Madrid showed an interest in signing
Kylian Mbappe was in December 2012 - although he was only approaching his 14th
birthday the Spanish giants knew they were looking at a prodigious talent.
Mbappe, who was living at the French Football Federation's
academy at Clairefontaine at the time, was invited to Madrid for a week, taken
to a game at the Santiago Bernabeu and to the club's training ground where he
met Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The young Kylian idolized Ronaldo, decorating his bedroom
with posters of the Portuguese superstar. There is a famous picture of Ronaldo
with his arm around the youngster, who only comes up to his hero's shoulder.
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On Monday, he posted on X that the move was "a dream
come true", yet it has taken more than a decade for Mbappe to make it back
to Madrid to play for the 15-time European champions.
Madrid tried again to sign Mbappe in the summer of 2017, but
Paris Saint-Germain lured him away from Monaco.
Real made a further attempt to buy him in 2021 and to sign
him in 2022, before he agreed to extend his stay at PSG. Now, however, Real
have their man.
He leaves PSG at the age of 25, after seven prolific years
in which he became his hometown club's all-time top scorer but never managed to
win the Champions League.
It has been a slow goodbye to Paris, but things have usually
moved fast for Mbappe in his career, almost as fast as the player himself in
full flight.
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There are few more thrilling sights in modern football than
Mbappe racing at an opposition defence. His pace is astonishing. He is a
voracious goal-scorer and is still a player who can dominate the sport for
years to come.
Even though PSG had already started the process of building
for a future without Mbappe, his departure is a monumental blow for the club.
It is significant move too for Mbappe, the boy brought up in
Bondy, the commune in the deprived Seine-Saint-Denis department which makes up
the inner north-eastern suburbs of Paris.
Bondy is immensely proud of Kylian, whose father Wilfried
coached him at the local club and whose mother, Fayza, was a handball player.
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After Mbappe signed for PSG a mural appeared on the side of
an apartment block overlooking the canal that runs from central Paris up
through Bondy. It was accompanied by the slogan: "Bondy, Ville des
Possibles" –- the town where anything is possible.
Mbappe's upbringing was unlike most in Bondy. He went to a
private school, for example. But he is an icon there, and throughout France.
Yet he always wanted to go to Madrid one day, just as they
were desperate to sign him.
"Real wanted Kylian but we wouldn't really have had our
bearings there had we gone," recalled Mbappe's father, who helped his son,
and many other budding players, develop as a youth coach in Bondy.
Instead, the youngster joined Monaco in 2013, Wilfried
moving down to the Mediterranean with him.
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His arrival in the principality did not go unnoticed, with Le Parisien dedicating an article "to one of the great hopes of his generation", who was photographed holding a Monaco shirt with the number seven on the back.
Mbappe, it said, had already signed a deal with Nike. He
revealed his plan to the newspaper, "to one day win the Ballon d'Or".
He was still 16 when he made his first-team debut for Monaco
in December 2015, beating Thierry Henry's record to become the principality
side's youngest-ever player.
Soon he became their youngest-ever goal-scorer, and in the
following 2016/17 season he starred in a Monaco team that reached the Champions
League semi-finals and netted 15 times as they won the Ligue 1 title.
A sensational 180 million-euro transfer to PSG followed at
the age of 18.
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The next year he won the World Cup, becoming the first
teenager since Pele in 1958 to score in the final, as France beat Croatia 4-2
in Moscow.
There was also his stunning hat-trick in the 2022 World Cup
final, which France lost on penalties to Lionel Messi's Argentina.
He has just finished as Ligue 1's leading scorer for a sixth
straight season. He has won the French title seven times, but now he will hope
a move to Madrid can finally see him win the Champions League and the Ballon
d'Or.
Before that he will be aiming to lead his country to glory at the European Championship in Germany.