Kylian Mbappé Reveals Close Call with Liverpool Move in 2016

Kylian Mbappé has lifted the lid on just how close he came to becoming a Liverpool player in 2016 – and how he ignored the one voice that wanted Anfield above all others: his mother’s.

Back then, Mbappé was an 18-year-old phenomenon at Monaco, ripping through Ligue 1 defences and drawing attention from Europe’s elite. Liverpool pushed hard. Very hard.

Jurgen Klopp, still in the early stages of his Anfield reign, went as far as arranging a private jet and a full family charm offensive to try to land the teenager. The club flew the Mbappé family from Blackpool to Nice on what Klopp later described as a private jet “with five rooms or something”, laying on food and long talks in the air.

“We really went all out,” Klopp recalled on Magenta TV during the 2026 World Cup.

They circled in the sky, talked football and future, shared a meal and a vision. The only thing they didn’t get was a signature.

Mbappé, now 27 and at Real Madrid, has told the Athletic just how persuasive Liverpool’s pitch was – and how strongly his mother wanted him on Merseyside.

“I was close to [joining] Liverpool. The favourite destination for my mum was Liverpool. She wanted me to go there,” he said.

His mother, a “big fan” of Klopp, went ahead of him for what Mbappé called the “first step” of negotiations. She didn’t just meet executives and shake hands. She went to the city. She walked around the stadium. She met the people.

“She went to the city, the stadium, she met the people. She was like, ‘it’s a wonderful club, everybody’s so kind, it’s a family club, a big club’,” Mbappé said.

Then came Anfield. That was the moment that hooked her.

“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.”

You can picture it: a mother in the stands, soaking in You’ll Never Walk Alone, trying to see her son under those lights.

But the decision was never hers to make.

“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,” Mbappé admitted. “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’.”

For Liverpool, the operation stayed in the shadows. Klopp said they didn’t want to be seen meeting the family, hence the aerial summit. The secrecy only added to the sense of a high-stakes courtship.

“We flew around in a circle, talked with the family, ate good food,” Klopp said. “We flew in a circle. It was fantastic. And then he went to Paris.”

The move to Paris Saint-Germain came first as a loan from Monaco, with an option to buy for 180m euros (£165.7m). PSG triggered it, and Mbappé spent seven years in his hometown, becoming the club’s all-time leading scorer before finally joining Real Madrid in 2024.

For him, the pull of home outweighed the romance of Anfield.

“It’s a funny story,” Mbappé said. “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 hometown.”

Liverpool were left with a tale of what might have been, a private jet that led nowhere, and the knowledge that, for once, even Anfield could not compete with the lure of home.