The standoff between Kylian Mbappé and PSG took a new turn at the end of the week. As a result of his persistent refusal to extend his contract beyond June 2024, the captain of the France team (24 years old, 70 caps) was dismissed from the first team, which went to Japan on Saturday for a summer tour. By this strong gesture, Nasser al-Khelaïfi hopes to force “KM” to sign a new lease or to find a club this summer, and thus not have to let him go for free in a year.
This is not the first time that the rag has burned between the capital club and an important player in its workforce. Like Kylian Mbappé, several Parisians have been punished with ground and access to the professional group in the past. Overview.
Without doubt the case most similar to that of Kylian Mbappé. The darling of the club, barely 17 years old when he was launched as a professional by Carlo Ancelotti in 2012, regularly has desires elsewhere during his seven seasons at the club. Sidelined from the professional group for the first time at the start of the 2014-2015 season after an aborted transfer to AS Roma, the international midfielder (37 caps) finally extended until 2019. This will be his last lease extension.
During the winter of 2018, and while he was the player most used by new coach Thomas Tuchel, Adrien Rabiot informed sports director Antero Henrique of his desire to leave the free club at the end of the season. “He will remain on the bench for an indefinite period,” said the Portuguese leader accordingly. And the word is kept. The objective is to sell the player from the January transfer window. Barca and Juventus are on the prowl but have no interest in spending millions to buy out the midfielder’s remaining six months of contract.
It is finally the transalpine club which recovers the left-hander for free on July 1, 2019. During his six months without treading a lawn, Rabiot will still have achieved the feat of being laid off for a week in March, after a nightclub outing following the elimination of PSG in the knockout stages of the Champions League, against Manchester United.
The conflict between “HBA” and PSG has never produced great sparks. The player trained at Olympique Lyonnais, champion of France with Marseille in 2010, was announced as a flagship recruit for the Parisian club in the summer of 2016 before being put on hold and slowly sinking into gloomy indifference. However, he has just made a resounding return to Ligue 1 under the colors of OGC Nice.
But Unaï Emery does not appreciate his profile and only establishes him five times. Discarded from April 2017, Ben Arfa no longer plays any match with the blue and red tunic. In the offseason, the leaders invite him to find a new base, but the left-hander prefers to stay warm and receive his salary (around 5 million euros per year). Sent to reserve in September 2017, he went free at the end of this 2017-2018 season.
His lawyer Jean-Jacques Bertrand has since told RMC that the origin of the discord between the club and the player dates back to a meeting with Tamim al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar. “The emir was attending the training of the team and at the end he went to see him and he even spoke in the language of the emir to greet him. It was completely normal. The president (Nasser al-Khelaïfi, editor’s note) was next door. I think there was a player quip, saying ‘I see you, it’s more difficult to speak with my president’, which was the case for the rest.
The Dhorasoo-PSG clash is undoubtedly the one with the most dramatic consequences. On October 11, 2006, the Normand was the first player in Ligue 1 history to be fired by his club. Originally, a very tense relationship with coach Guy Lacombe. After a good first season in Paris and participation in the 2006 World Cup with the Blues, Dhorasoo was sidelined from the professional group in the light of the 2006-2007 financial year. Lacombe justifies his decision by a “lack of performance”.
“Humiliated”, the player pours out to several media, openly criticizes his coach and steals a confidential document to reveal it to the general public. Laid off on September 26, 2006, the man who is now a political activist close to La France Insoumise (LFI) was finally fired two weeks later, officially for “breaches of his ‘obligation of reserve’, his ‘duty of loyalty’ as well as ‘acts of insubordination, disobedience’, and an ‘attitude of permanent provocation’.”
“I no longer have any illusions about the man, Lacombe had declared in the press a few days before the final sanction. If Vikash acted in this way, it is because we have become accustomed to giving players a feeling of impunity. What if PSG’s leniency issues didn’t date back to the Qatari era?