Carlo Ancelotti and Florentino Pérez at the Stade de France after winning the Champions League against Liverpool. MOLLY DARLINGTON (REUTERS)
After the loss of Kylian Mbappé and the signing of Antonio Rüdiger and Aurélien Tchouameni, the president of Real Madrid made the first public reference to the failed operation involving the Paris Saint-Germain striker this Thursday morning in an interview at the El beach bar, he said , that about 15 days before the footballer sent him a message telling him that he was staying in Paris, he had already noticed signs that the operation had gone wrong: “We have seen that it has changed . He didn’t want to do a joint sponsorship act with all his teammates. It shocked me. Football is a community sport, everyone has equal rights. That and a lot more. He had been offered the practically not only leader of a football team, but also of a club. This is not the Mbappé I wanted to bring. He must have changed his dream,” he said.
Pérez recalled what he always got from the French player: “Mbappé conveyed to the whole world his desire to play for Real Madrid, which was his dream. He has stated it publicly. We wanted to do it last August but it wasn’t possible. They didn’t let him,” he said in reference to the offers of up to €200m that Madrid transferred to the Parisian club last summer with Mbappé’s approval. But Nasser Al-Khelaifi didn’t even reply to the offer. They didn’t want to sell it. And he wanted to leave.”
However, the time until the end of this season and his contract with PSG became too long and, according to Pérez, it was enough to put the pressure on the player: “He is very young. The pressure affects us all, the young people more. The President of the Republic calls you, tells you not to go. There’s little point in the President of the Republic calling you. That definitely influenced him a lot.”
Between the pressure and what Al-Khelaifi had offered him, Pérez assured that he saw a transformation in Mbappé that didn’t match what he knew: “I want a footballer. He changes because they offer him different things, they put pressure on him and he’s already a different footballer.” “The Mbappé who wanted to come here is not the one I finally found. If so, I prefer that he stays at PSG. The one I met is the one from the dream,” he said. “This Mbappé is not my Mbappé. I don’t want this Mbappé who refuses to do a promotional act with his national team.”
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