Kylian Mbappé Reflects on His Journey to Real Madrid
Kylian Mbappé has finally put words to a saga that stretched across a decade. Behind his move to the Santiago Bernabéu, he says, stood one constant figure: Florentino Pérez.
In a candid interview with AS, the French forward lifted the lid on a relationship that began long before he pulled on the white shirt.
“He’s the one who brought me here. We’ve stayed in touch for ten years before I arrived,” Mbappé revealed. “He always showed affection and understanding in the context of every decision made, both positive and negative for Real Madrid. He always told me that one day I would play for Real Madrid, and here I am, and very happy.”
That bond, nurtured quietly in the background, survived every twist of his career. While transfer sagas raged in public, Pérez kept the lines open in private. Mbappé himself summed it up bluntly in a line that quickly spread across social media: “I was in contact with Pérez since 10 years before joining Real Madrid.”
“Nothing and no one has to convince you”
For all the president’s influence, Mbappé is adamant: Real Madrid sells itself.
He grew up with the club on his walls and in his imagination. For him, this was not a sales pitch. It was a path he always believed he would walk.
“To be honest, nothing and no one has to convince you to come to Real Madrid,” the World Cup winner said. “In my history with Madrid, I wanted to come, but it wasn’t possible, and ultimately, in football, there are moments and decisions that are beyond your control. In football, timing is key, and you have to wait for everything to be right before you can go.”
Those missed chances carried a cost. Mbappé admitted the emotional toll of seeing previous moves fall apart, of watching the door close just as it seemed ready to open. But he refused to dwell on it.
“Of course, there’s disappointment, but a footballer’s life is about looking forward, not back,” he noted.
The message is clear: not even the most powerful man in Spanish football needed to sit him down and sell him a project. The badge did that years ago.
“No one had to convince me to come to Real Madrid, not even Pérez, as big a club as he is. It was obvious,” Mbappé said. Then came the line that underlines how he views this step in his career: “If you want to be part of football history, one day you have to play for Real Madrid.”
A new life, a higher level
Since arriving in Spain, Mbappé has settled quickly into life at Valdebebas and in the capital. The change of country, he says, has brought a calm he was looking for, even as his profile has climbed again.
“I expected the best club in the world, to receive a lot of excitement from Madridistas all over the world,” he said. “When I arrived here I already had a status, but when you are a Real Madrid player you move to another level, to a higher level.”
That, for Mbappé, is the point of it all. The pressure, the spotlight, the noise – they come with the territory he always wanted to enter.
“I think that if you want to belong to the history of football, you have to go through Real Madrid.”
He has made that journey now. The decade-long conversation with Pérez is over. The real story starts on the pitch.
