Mbappé threatens revolt while Neymar remains at PSG

Since he signed his renewal with Paris Saint-Germain in May, Kylian Mbappé has not stopped demanding a fundamental requirement to fulfill his contract.

As one person who works for the French player says: "We only ask the club for a management model based on rigor."

Euphemisms and hints are enough for the owners of PSG, the princes who govern Qatar, to understand that there is a tacit clause according to which Mbappé demands the departure of Neymar Júnior as a

of his permanence in the Parc des Princes until 2025.

This is confirmed by sources close to PSG and the player, who warn that Mbappé has never put Neymar's name on the table nor has he asked to leave early.

Nothing is explicit in the most politicized club in France, especially when it comes to the fate of the Brazilian star, signed in 2017 for 222 million euros, a record still in force, and automatically renewed last July until 2027, to the perplexity of many PSG employees and of Mbappé himself.

The surprising renewal of Neymar was the first of the disappointments for Mbappé and his entourage of relatives and lawyers, who since then have not stopped filtering a growing disenchantment.

Among other things, because Neymar is convinced that Mbappé has asked to be fired, which does not help his relationship – always intertwined with jealousy and lucrative advertising convenience commitments – to be channeled in a professional way.

If PSG, as a football team, was built on the pillars of its attack, now the system is oscillating on a contradiction.

The tactical and strategic balance depends on the empathy that three stars can cultivate whose dynamics lead to the isolation of Mbappé, the man who as

should act as the end point of all plays.

When this Sunday, after the classic with Marseille, he was asked if it was true that he wanted to leave PSG, his answer was ambiguous.

“I have never asked to leave in January,” he said, without giving a single compliment to the club that has just paid him 130 million euros just to renew, plus 40 million annual salary.

"I'm happy," he added, hieratic, and when asked if he still trusted the leaders, he replied evasively: "I'm just a soccer player and my duty is to play."

It has always been difficult to play out of duty, and even less to play the ball if your teammates are suspicious.

They say in PSG that Lionel Messi shares with Neymar the impression that the footballing stature of the

is far below his fame and does not even remotely correspond to his salary.

Messi doesn't give him much of a ball, even though Bondy's boy speaks fluent Spanish, with strong reminiscences from the River Plate.

The Argentine prefers the complicity of Neymar, although he is scared by the dissipation that presides over the life of his friend in Paris, a contraindication of all the established norms about what order in the elite should be.

The president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, has understood this after five years of useless experimentation.

Persuaded that the presence of Neymar prevents the growth of the team, and determined to comply with Mbappé, the PSG president put the Brazilian on the market last summer.

With no more result than an offer from Newcastle.

The English club was the only one in the world that was willing to respect the almost 400 million euros that PSG owes Neymar for all concepts, until 2027. Neymar ruled out Newcastle as inhospitable and was only curious about the proposal of the Chelsea, who offered him 10 million net for a year of transfer: a quarter of his income.

PSG would have yielded him by paying the remaining three quarters if it had not been for French law, as the lawyers warned,

It prevents the bulk of the income from being taxed in France if the services that are paid for are provided to a company domiciled abroad.

Chelsea did not exceed 10 million because in July Neymar weighed seven kilos more, according to sources from the English club, and had just completed a painful season.

Chelsea, for Neymar

Now Chelsea have changed their minds.

Reports circulate in Todd Boehly's club that approve the investment of 40 million euros per year for the transfer of Neymar, the total of his net salary, provided that the player performs at the current level.

Obsessed with getting in shape for the World Cup in Qatar, the 30-year-old Brazilian is playing his best football since he joined PSG.

His 16 goals and 12 assists reflect a competitive solidity superior to that of Mbappé and Messi.

Spurred on by rebellion, Neymar is on his way to reaching the highest peak of productivity and maturity of his entire career.

What Luis Campos, the sports director of PSG, sees as more complicated is that these benefits are maintained after the World Cup final, scheduled for December 18.

Al-Khelaifi, according to PSG sources, has no doubts.

Today, for the president, the priority is to keep Mbappé getting rid of Neymar.

The Frenchman, his relatives say, remains expectant.

The club's plan, they tell him, is to get a loan or even find an extravagant exit route.

"Here they have been studying for months how to pay Neymar the highest settlement in the history of sport, about 300 million euros," says a person who works for the Paris club.

PSG players, employees and technicians repeat it periodically: the Qatari management model, founded on the exaltation of Neymar, has been since 2017 the trigger for alterations that have undisciplined the dressing room, generating a burden when competing for the Champions League.

This is the Gordian knot that is enlarged before Al-Khelaifi, tormented for a week by the rumors of disenchantment that Mbappé's inner circle emits, reflected on a cover of

and exacerbated by information from Mediapart, which assured that in 2019 PSG hired a marketing agency to denigrate journalists and players through a constellation of fake Twitter accounts.

Mbappé was one of those harassed.

Uncle Pierre's advice

Mbappé has not asked PSG to let him out at the moment.

But in the event of a breakup, Real Madrid is not the only club that pleases its entourage.

On the contrary.

For his uncle Pierre Mbappé, the clan's most respected football advisor, the most appropriate destination, from a sporting point of view, would have been to go to Liverpool last summer.

The club owned by the American group Fenway Sports has been in contact with the player's family for years.

According to the British press, in recent days the owners have reassessed the possibility of hiring Mbappé in 2023.

Liverpool went through the worst crisis of the last five years when at the end of September, in the midst of a wave of poor results, it became clear that Darwin Núñez, the signing that had cost him 100 million, was not up to his price.

Jürgen Klopp, the coach, was more distant than ever from his players, especially from Mo Salah, who until recently was his favourite.

The regeneration of the squad had been interrupted and fearing that Klopp would consider resigning, and terrified at the fragility shown by a financially unviable team outside the Champions League, the owners rushed to draw up all kinds of emergency alternatives.

One of them was to retry the signing of Mbappé, making the transfer cheaper with a swap for Salah.

The idea of ​​​​Liverpool is not new and is reciprocated.

According to a person who works for the French player, Liverpool was the destination that, due to purely sporting conditions, his uncle Pierre, brother of the player's father, advised him.

Pierre is a highly respected football coach and analyst in France and in the Premier.

His was the responsibility of taking his nephew to the Monaco youth academy, a club with which he became a professional and won Ligue 1 in 2017.

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