Kylian Mbappé's Near Move to Liverpool: A Family Decision

Kylian Mbappé has lifted the lid on just how close he came to becoming a Liverpool player as a teenager – and how his mother was convinced Anfield, not Paris, should have been his stage.

Speaking to The Athletic, the France captain revealed that in the summer of 2017, while still at Monaco, he held a face‑to‑face meeting with then-Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp on a private jet flying over the south of France. He was 18, on the brink of superstardom, and weighing up the first seismic decision of his career.

“I had to take a decision. And yes, I was close to Liverpool,” Mbappé said. “My mum was a big fan of Jürgen Klopp and the favourite destination for my mum was Liverpool. She wanted me to go there.”

Fayza Lamari, his mother and agent, sat in on the talks with Klopp. She pushed hard for Merseyside. Klopp, already building the side that would go on to conquer Europe, tried to sell the teenager on the idea of Anfield instead of Paris Saint-Germain.

Mbappé remembers the family tug-of-war clearly.

“I didn’t listen because I wanted to play in my city, Paris,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to leave my country before I was someone. But yes, my mum was always saying, ‘Liverpool – you’re going to be there, playing at Anfield, it’s going to be insane for you.’ I was like, ‘OK!’”

Lamari did her homework. She travelled to Liverpool during negotiations, walked around Anfield, and watched games alone just to feel the place, to picture her son in that red shirt.

“She was like, ‘It’s a wonderful club, everybody’s so kind, it’s a family club, a big club,’” Mbappé recalled. “She went to Anfield and fell in love with it. She watched a few games alone, to feel the atmosphere, because she wanted to imagine me in this stadium.

“All the time we were talking. [I would say:] ‘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.”

Klopp later joked about that meeting, telling German outlet Magenta TV earlier this year that the private-jet summit was “the most expensive non-transfer we ever made” – a costly charm offensive that never delivered its man.

The journey from Blackpool to Nice, the personal pitch from Klopp, the enthusiasm of Mbappé’s mother – none of it could quite pull him away from home. The forward chose PSG, initially on loan for the 2017-18 season before making the move permanent the following year. He stayed in Paris until his long-anticipated switch to Real Madrid in 2024.

“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 said.

Liverpool were left with a story of what might have been. Mbappé, instead, set about proving he could own his city before he went in search of the world.