Kylian Mbappé's Near Transfer to Liverpool in 2017

Kylian Mbappé has revealed just how close Liverpool came to pulling off one of the great modern transfer coups back in 2017 – and how it was his mother who pushed hardest for Anfield.

Back then he was the phenomenon at Monaco, a teenager tearing through defences and drawing a queue of Europe’s giants to his door. Real Madrid circled. PSG circled. Liverpool, quietly, did far more than circle.

A private jet, a secret pitch and Klopp’s big sell

Jurgen Klopp didn’t just pick up the phone. He took the courtship into the clouds.

Liverpool arranged a clandestine meeting on a five-room private jet, a flying boardroom designed for one mission: convince Mbappé that Anfield should be his next stage. Klopp laid out his sporting project, his vision, his belief in what the youngster could become in red.

Mbappé remembers it vividly.

"I remember we were on the plane and we were turning around and around in the air while he was explaining his project," he recalled, speaking to The Athletic. The message from the Frenchman was clear: Klopp didn’t need to oversell it. "You don't need to convince me. You're Jurgen 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."

Even then, he knew he was choosing between giants. "Whatever decision I take is going to be a good decision because we are talking about some of the biggest clubs in the world," he told Klopp. The jet kept circling; the choice kept weighing.

Anfield wins a heart – just not his

While Liverpool’s hierarchy worked in the air, Mbappé’s mother was doing her own homework on the ground.

She flew to Merseyside for the early stages of talks, walked the city, went to matches on her own and soaked up the Anfield noise. She met people around the club, felt the tone of the place, tested the stories she had heard about Liverpool being a family club rather than just a superclub.

"She went to the stadium, she met the people," Mbappé said. "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."

Her verdict was emphatic. "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!'" Mbappé added, laughing at the memory.

Klopp helped that argument. "Jurgen Klopp was an amazing manager. I met him and had a wonderful relationship with him. I had big respect for him."

Liverpool had the project. They had the manager. They even had the approval of the most influential voice in the player’s life. For a moment, the stars looked aligned.

The pull of Paris

Then reality cut through the romance.

PSG moved, hard and fast. The chance to become the face of his hometown club, to dominate in the city where he was born and raised, proved decisive. The Premier League dream, and Liverpool’s audacious pursuit, faded.

Mbappé joined PSG initially on loan from Monaco before the deal became permanent for €180 million, one of the most eye-watering fees in football history. Liverpool were left with a story of what might have been, and the knowledge they had pushed as far as they could.

For Mbappé, the logic was simple. Paris was home. "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.

From missed signing to global icon

The years that followed justified the scale of that decision.

In Paris, Mbappé stacked up trophies and numbers at a relentless rate, becoming the face of Ligue 1 and one of the defining forwards of his generation. On the international stage, he exploded even faster.

He won the World Cup with France in 2018 as a teenager, announcing himself to the planet with the kind of authority few players ever manage. By the 2026 tournament, he had gone further still, 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.

From that almost-transfer to Liverpool’s emerging project, he had grown into the player every superclub wanted.

A new chapter in white, and a lingering “what if”

In 2024, the move many had long expected finally landed. Mbappé left France and signed for Real Madrid, trading the Parc des Princes for the Bernabéu and stepping into a shirt worn by some of the greatest forwards in history.

Liverpool, by then, had already lived an entire era under Klopp without him – Champions League glory, a Premier League title, and a legacy built with different heroes.

Still, the story of the private jet, the circling plane, the mother who fell for Anfield and the manager he admired lingers as one of the great sliding doors moments of modern football.

How different would the last decade have looked if Mbappé had walked out at Anfield instead of the Parc des Princes?