Kylian Mbappe has closed his Paris Saint-Germain chapter and begun a new chapter at Real Madrid, but the 2024 departure from his old home still hasn’t quite been put to rest just yet.
The France superstar initially struggled to begin life with Real Madrid smoothly, but managed to turn his fortunes around entirely, finishing the 2024/25 season as La Liga’s top goal scorer.
Now, Mbappe will square off against his former French club for the first time as Real Madrid meet PSG in the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup semifinals.
Mbappe’s exit from PSG still lingers in the background — he tried valiantly to depart the club amicably, but tensions both on and off the pitch made that impossible. Now, a dispute with the French giants lingers in the background even a year after joining another club.
The Sporting News explains the timeline and inner workings of this legal battle with as much information as we know at this time.
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Kylian Mbappe claims PSG owe millions in unpaid wages, bonuses
The 25-year-old claims that PSG owe him €55 million ($60.6m / £46.5m) in unpaid wages. PSG, meanwhile, assert that Mbappe waived this figure in August of 2023 when he signed away the final year of his contract by denying his player option.
His unpaid wages stem from the final three months of his 2023/24 salary as well as the final third of his loyalty bonus for that season.
PSG allege that Mbappe agreed to forego those payments prior to the campaign, when he had been frozen out of the club amidst reports that he could leave for Real Madrid. At the time, PSG had hoped to sell Mbappe and avoid allowing him to leave on a free transfer, but the parties eventually came together and the French star played his final season with the club.
According to the club, the terms of that arrangement made it so the club was no longer obligated to those payments.
A report by French publication Le Monde states that Mbappe has contacted the legal department of the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) as well as European governing body UEFA to resolve the situation.
The Athletic has detailed the jumbled mess of he-said, she-said verbal agreements and assumptions that both sides had regarding Mbappe’s contract clauses and eventual exit strategy, which contains a mess of if-then statements that both sides clearly dispute.
At the heart of it all is an apparent clause in his contract which stated if Mbappe did not wish to trigger his third-year option, then the club would sell him for at least €180 million, allowing both sides to gain something from the early exit. Unfortunately for PSG, this is a tricky matter — if Mbappe did not extend his contract by a year via the option, then his contract would expire in the summer of 2024, allowing him to leave for free.
Mbappe rejected a move to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2023 that would have seen PSG profit a world-record transfer fee of nearly €300 million, and thus the club considered talks with Real Madrid that summer to be “inappropriate.”
In the end, PSG were apparently under the impression that Mbappe would reduce his bonuses for the final year of his contract so as to not extort the club out-of-pocket knowing he would eventually leave for free. However, this seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that never came to fruition, leaving the sides to argue the validity of this handshake.
Kylian Mbappe rejects mediation offer from Ligue 1
According to a statement by Kylian Mbappe’s representatives issued to The Associated Press, the player is not willing to negotiate a compromising end to this dispute.
While Ligue 1 reportedly made an attempt to mediate the dispute, that was apparently rejected by Mbappe’s camp.
“The eventuality of a mediation was mentioned this morning,” the statement, published in mid-September, read. “This possibility was rejected during the meeting by the player’s representative. A mediation would be useless to record a lack of payment that would be seen from a simple analysis of the player’s payslip.”
Essentially, Mbappe claims that his contract stipulates exactly how much he is owed, and he wants PSG to pay up the amount agreed upon.
However, the club took a different approach to the situation. PSG released their own public statement, saying Mbappe made “clear, repeated public and private commitments that must be respected, having been afforded unprecedented benefits by the club over seven fantastic years in Paris.”
