Mbappe’s mother walked round Anfield and wanted him at Liverpool, and he signed for PSG instead
Nine years after Liverpool flew the whole family around the Mediterranean in a private jet, Mbappe has given his own account of the move that never happened.
Sep 22, 2026
Jurgen Klopp told his version of this story in July. Liverpool chartered a private jet from Blackpool to Nice, the entire Mbappe family climbed aboard a plane with five cabins, and the thing flew in circles over the Mediterranean while everybody had dinner and Klopp made his pitch. He called it the most expensive non-transfer Liverpool ever invested in. It is a good line, and it has the shape of a story told by the man who lost.
Now Kylian Mbappe has told the other half of it, and the detail that stands out is not the jet. It is his mother.
She wanted Anfield
Speaking to The Athletic, Mbappe confirmed how close it came. “It was while I was playing in Monaco. I had to take a decision. And yes, I was close to Liverpool.”
The push was not coming from his agent or his father. It was coming from home.
“My mum was a big fan of Jurgen Klopp and the favourite destination for my mum was Liverpool,” he said. “She wanted me to go there.”
Fayza Lamari went to the club herself, met the staff, walked round Anfield and came back sold on the place. Mbappe’s recollection of how it was sold to him is almost funny in its simplicity: Liverpool, Anfield, it is going to be insane for you. He remembers saying OK.
And then he said no.
The reason he gives is not about football
“I didn’t listen because I wanted to play in my city, Paris. I didn’t want to leave my country before I was someone.”
That second sentence is the whole thing. An 18-year-old who had just won Ligue 1 with Monaco and taken them to a Champions League semi-final, with the biggest clubs in Europe queueing up, decided that being a great player abroad was worth less to him than being a great player at home first. He wanted Paris to have watched it happen.
You can argue he was wrong. Liverpool won a Champions League in 2019 and a Premier League in 2020 with a front three he would have walked into. PSG got him for seven years, six Ligue 1 titles and one Champions League final, the 1-0 defeat to Bayern in Lisbon in 2020. They also got knocked out of Europe in ways that became a genre of their own. On the trophies that decide these arguments, the road not taken looks better.
But the logic he describes is not really a football calculation, and treating it as one misses him. He has said versions of this before. He wanted to be the kid from Bondy who became a star in Paris, not the kid from Bondy who left.
What Liverpool actually missed
It is worth being precise about the counterfactual, because “Liverpool nearly signed Mbappe” gets repeated as though they nearly signed the 2026 version. They did not. They nearly signed an 18-year-old with one full season behind him who had scored a lot of goals in a Monaco team built to produce exactly that.
Klopp’s Liverpool would have got the development years, the ones PSG got, and there is no telling what a front line of Salah, Firmino and Mbappe does to the rest of that decade. What Liverpool would not have got is what Real Madrid have now. By the time he left Paris in 2024 he was a finished player, and he left on a free.
The nine years since have not been quiet for either party. Liverpool won the lot without him. Mbappe won a World Cup in 2018, lost the final in 2022, and this summer became the first man to take the Golden Boot at consecutive World Cups, ten goals in a tournament France went out of in the semi-finals. He is 27, at the club he always seemed destined for, and still being asked about a plane ride he took as a teenager.
The mother was right about the club, at least
There is something in this worth sitting with. An 18-year-old was handed a decision that would define twenty years of his life, and the person who saw it most clearly was his mum, who had done the homework, gone to the ground and worked out what kind of place it was.
He overruled her. He has a World Cup medal and a career almost nobody in the history of the sport can match, so it is hard to call it a mistake in any ordinary sense. It is just one of those decisions that stays interesting forever, because both answers were right and he only got to pick one.
This summer, after France beat Morocco in the quarter-final, Mbappe pointed up into the stand to show Klopp where his mother was sitting, and Klopp, on punditry duty for German television, waved back at her. That is about the size of what is left of it.