Kylian Mbappé's Liverpool Courtship: A Jet-Set Pitch
Kylian Mbappé still remembers the pitch. Not the grass at Anfield, but the carpet of a five-room private jet circling in the sky while Jürgen Klopp tried to sell him a future in red.
Back in 2017, Mbappé was the most coveted teenager in Europe, tearing up Ligue 1 with Monaco and drawing offers from the continent’s elite. Real Madrid wanted him. Paris Saint-Germain wanted him. Liverpool wanted him badly enough to take negotiations into the clouds.
The Liverpool courtship
Merseyside quickly became a serious option inside the Mbappé camp. His family liked the project, liked the club, liked the people. His mother liked it most of all.
She flew to England on her own for the first steps of the talks. No entourage, no fanfare. Just a mother doing due diligence on what could become her son’s first giant leap. She walked the city, went to matches, and felt the stadium breathe.
"She went to the stadium, she met the people," Mbappé recalled to The Athletic. "She was like, 'It's a wonderful club, everybody's so kind, it's a family club, a big club.' She went to Anfield and fell in love with it.
"All the time we were talking. 'What do you think, Mum?' She'd say, 'For me, you have to go to Liverpool.' I said, 'OK, OK, OK!' because Jürgen Klopp was an amazing manager. I met him and had a wonderful relationship with him. I had big respect for him."
Liverpool’s hierarchy did everything to turn that affection into a signature. Klopp, never shy of a grand gesture, arranged that secret meeting on a luxurious jet, complete with five rooms and one clear mission: convince the most exciting young forward in Europe that Anfield was his next home.
Klopp’s airborne pitch
Mbappé remembers the scene vividly. Not a boardroom. Not a training ground. A plane looping in the air while Klopp laid out his vision.
"I remember we were on the plane and we were turning around and around in the air while he was explaining his project," Mbappé said. "I said, 'You don't need to convince me. You're Jürgen Klopp, it's Liverpool, a great club, so of course if I'm here, I have some interest. But I have other things, other projects, that are also good.'
"I said to him, 'Whatever decision I take is going to be a good decision because we are talking about some of the biggest clubs in the world.' It's a funny story."
The charm offensive was real. The respect was mutual. The family pressure leaned towards England. For a moment, Liverpool felt close — very close.
Then the hometown pull took over.
Paris wins the battle
When the time came, Mbappé chose PSG. First on loan, then permanently for €180 million, one of the biggest transfers the game has ever seen.
"But in the end I took the decision to go to PSG because for me, born and raised in Paris, there was no better feeling than to show I could be a star in my home town," he explained.
Liverpool were left with a story and a regret, wondering how different their Klopp era might have looked with Mbappé at the tip of the attack. PSG, meanwhile, got their man and built a dynasty around him in the French capital.
He delivered. Ligue 1 titles, domestic cups, Champions League runs. And while the club chased European glory, Mbappé was already rewriting history on the international stage.
From Anfield dream to global icon
In 2018, still a teenager, he helped fire France to the World Cup, announcing himself as a superstar on the biggest stage. Eight years later, at the 2026 tournament, he went even further, surpassing Miroslav Klose and Lionel Messi to become the competition’s all-time leading scorer before France fell to eventual champions Spain in the semi-finals.
By then, the boy Liverpool once courted had become a global icon.
The story finally took another turn in 2024, when Mbappé left PSG and France behind to join Real Madrid, completing a move that had been years in the making.
Liverpool’s private jet has long since landed. The what-if still hangs in the air.
