Revenge in the air as Kylian Mbappé and PSG clash in Club World Cup semi-final | Kylian Mbappé

TIt’s a story of blackmail and revenge, at least it’s okay. Of power and money, a lot money. It is also a sports story. The accumulation of the semi-final of the club World Cup between Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, these two empires and enemies, did not start with an update of the fitness of Atlanta or Palm Beach; He started on Monday morning in New York, with news from Paris that Kylian Mbappé had withdrawn a legal complaint accusing his former extortion and harassment club. Two days before kick -off, it was time for football.

Well, in a way. “The Real Madrid striker and his entourage want to calm the situation and focus exclusively on sporting problems,” the team reported. Certainly nothing to do with their prospects to win the case, then. In addition, there is always the request of 55 million euros in wages and allegedly unpaid bonuses, which led the accounts of PSG momentarily blocked. PSG claims that Mbappé agreed to give up 55 million euros when it left and the club has made a counterclamation of 98 million euros. The accusations and counter-accusation are multiple, the quantities attractive, the essential bitterness even if it is hidden behind a polished exterior.

Revenge is a dish that is best served cold and a word overused in football, and Mbappé and Psg were always going to cross one day, but this time, it really applies. There is a story, scores to settle. “I have been at PSG for a long time,” said Mbappé when he left for Madrid 13 months ago. Seven years he had spent in Paris; For almost everyone, Madrid threw a shadow. In 2021, PSG fans hooked him because they thought he was going to Madrid. In 2022, Madrid fans were just as angry because they discovered that it was not. In 2023, the Parisian said that he returned and that he called them liars. In 2024, he finally did it.

His future has become a state question, the intense and applied pressure of the Palais de l’Elysée and Doha. “It was not an easy situation; I wouldn’t want anyone who goes through it, ”he said. When Mbappé extended his contract at PSG for the last time in 2022, there was a renewal payment of 180 million euros, a salary of 72 million euros per year and annual loyalty bonuses, from 70 million euros. That he was not convinced, perhaps even he had been forced, or perhaps he had played them, quickly became obvious: it was not a three-year agreement but two more one and he had barely signed it when he informed them that he would not extend.

The PSG let him train with the reserves, seated it in the stand and tried to sell it when they could still obtain costs. Madrid, however, did not move and he resisted the threats and played again. Once he was allowed to return to the fold, had spoken publicly of an agreement with Nasser Al-Khelaifi who would protect the two parties, no matter what happened. The president of PSG, on the other hand, said that Mbappé would never go for free. But he left for free. In his statement, he did not mention Khelaifi.

PSG had lost. And then they won. The day Mbappé left was like a release. It turned out that PSG was also released. In the morning before their quarter -final of the club World Cup against Bayern Munich last week, Khelaifi spoke of a change of culture, the way there are “23, 24 warriors” now, the unlike before Go without saying; About the way these days is the team, and this is the best team he had. If it seems a little rich to be presumptuous on this subject, to be proud of it as if it were a plan, when the hierarchy did everything they could to keep Mbappé in Paris, it is true.

At the end of the season, an old Marca coverage of one of the European eliminations of PSG was inevitably dug again, showing France forward with the title: “If you want to win the Champions League, you know what you have to do.” So he did it … and PSG won him instead. The equation Mbappé leaves = PSG Win is too simple, too reductionist, but it is difficult to resist. He had left PSG, the team that just couldn’t win the competition to go to the club which always seems to do it. Madrid was eliminated in the quarterfinals and PSG had won him. The Mbappé legal team had wanted UEFA to examine whether PSG should be authorized to participate in the light of the complaint of 55 million euros.

Mbappé is the top scorer in PSG, with 256 goals. In Madrid, he obtained a hat -trick at La Clásico in May, another against Manchester City in the Champions League, and scored in the Copa Del Rey final. He scored 44 goals: no beginners never got more. How not to call it a success? How could you blame him for the change of fortune? And yet, Clásico was lost, the Champions League finished the next round, and in the Cup final, Madrid was also defeated.

In the middle of the season, he said that he had touched the “background of the rocks”; “It’s a mental thing,” he said, describing missed sanctions against Liverpool and Athletic as “a good time [that] changed my mentality. I couldn’t do worse: I could only go up. I had to do more. It was a moment of: BAM!Change everything. I did not come to Madrid to play badly ”. At that time, however, it was late and the collective discomfort was irreversible.

Meanwhile, the battles with PSG continued out of the field, no clean break, no closure, despite the release. Instead, bitterness has persisted. When Mbappé’s complaint was made public in April, his lawyers declared “time to attack” after having “resolved things peacefully”, seeking what they said that it was due: the behavior had been “scandalous and indecent” and they wanted to “send a clear message: it is enough”. A PSG spokesperson told Efe that these statements were “a fantasy of a parallel universe”. It was they which sought damage.

Damage? It turned out that his departure had done them well. They won the Champions League and in Ousmane Dembélé the main candidate to win the Ballon d’Or, which Mbappé had also left. “When a player like me comes to a team, many things change,” said Mbappé, and not all of them were for the best. Madrid, winner of the League and the Champions League without Mbappé, won nothing with him. And if it was unfair, even absurd, for him to become a symbol of Madrid’s failure and the success of PSG, at the end of the season, while a relentless PSG team has torn inter, some analyzes suggested that it was like that.

A particular scene of No idea téméis or putaA superb initiate documentary on Luis Enrique of the last season of Mbappé, offered an explanation of what had happened. In this document, the PSG coach sits in Mbappé in front of a screen on the PSG training field and asks him to finish the legend describing his previous performance: It is … something. The missing word is catastrophic. He tries to go to Mbappé by speaking of his hero, the legend of the NBA Michael Jordan: a player who “would catch his teammates by the balls and would run to defend as a mother fucking”.

ThatLuis Enrique insists, is a leader. “As an attacker, you are God, I know, a phenomenon, high“, He said,” but that’s not what is close to my heart. If you press, it’s the company. If in addition, you get Dembélé, [Randal] Kolo Muani, Marcos Asencio to put pressure, do you know what we have? A team that is a fucking machine. And that’s where you are Michael Jordan.

Luis Enrique said to his attacker: “I want you to go through the front door, Kiki, but you have to win this.” Towards the end of the series, at that time that everyone knows that Mbappé leaves and they fear the worst, when he was refused in his pursuit of the Champions League, there is a time when the coach says: “Next year, we will be better, without any doubt, because when a player will control them. Without exception. And therefore it was an additional dimension added to the PSG Champions Victory Not say, their former striker winning anything, the inexpected Schadenfreude.

The Club World Cup offers a way to come back to Madrid and Mbappé, perhaps, a competition that remains, at least this season. However, while something went under the new coach, Xabi Alonso, he has been without Mbappé so far. After being in the hospital with a stomach virus and lost 5 kg, it did not start; In his place, Gonzalo García, a 21 -year -old academic striker, was a revelation. Against Dortmund, however, Mbappé came and marked a brilliant acrobatic stolen. “A good way to show that I feel good again,” he called it; The next day, he withdrew his accusation of extortion, but revenge is another matter, ready to finally start just in time to meet PSG, a place in a final of the World Cup in play.

“We were lucky this year without [Mbappé]But I also wish him the best, “Khelaifi said just before the start of this competition, as if someone bought this.” Even if we have a little conflict, honestly, from the bottom of my heart, I wish him the best. “Except,” added the president of PSG, “when he plays us.”