The signs that Liverpool were set to sign Kylian Mbappe in 2022 after Jurgen Klopp move, but ended up with Darwin Nunez instead

Kylian Mbappe will likely never fulfil his mother’s wish of playing in Liverpool red but that doesn’t mean he didn’t come close.

The Frenchman ended one of football’s most predictable transfer sagas by joining Real Madrid this summer but interest from Anfield had also always lingered over his career.

Liverpool came close to landing Mbappe as a teenager when he left Monaco in 2017, with Jurgen Klopp holding talks with the forward.

The capture of the then-18-year-old on lower wages but high potential represented the type of signing the club’s American owners love to make.

Fenway Sports Group chief John W. Henry held a two-hour meeting with Mbappe’s family on his private jet around the bay of Nice.

However, the player’s preference to remain in his homeland saw boyhood club Paris Saint-Germain win the race for his signature.

His subsequent rise to become the face of European football in the post-Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo era should have killed all talk of Liverpool’s net spend king owners FSG sanctioning any future move.

However, if anything, links between Mbappe and Merseyside increased during his time at PSG – aided by a courtship that played out in public.

Parisian outlet L’Equipe have now sensationally claimed the 25-year-old reached a verbal agreement to join Liverpool two years ago.

Mbappe is said to have struck terms on a short-term deal at Anfield before signing a two-year contract extension with PSG in 2022.

The Ligue 1 giants were desperate to avoid doing business with Madrid had they been forced into a sale that summer, but a provision was allegedly inserted in Mbappe’s Liverpool terms to facilitate a future move to the Bernabeu.

All sound too fanciful to be true? Perhaps, but let’s look at the evidence that could prove that maybe the signs were there all along…

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Klopp’s early extension ‘good for transfer windows’

In April 2022, Klopp delighted Liverpool fans by announcing that he had put pen to paper on a two-year extension to his contract.

His deal hadn’t been due to expire until 2024 – ironically when he chose to leave the club anyway – but the timing is significant.

The futures of the German’s long-serving front three Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane were much more pressing, with each of the trio about to enter the final years of their contracts.

As the three attackers were also approaching, or had already celebrated, their 30th birthdays at the time – historically when Liverpool’s FSG owners get skittish over offering out pay rises – a decision needed to be made over whether they would sign new deals or be moved on rather than risk losing them for free in 2023.

So why the fast-tracking of negotiations and announcement of an extension with Klopp?

Well, a day before Liverpool’s 1-0 win over Newcastle on April 30, Klopp claimed that it ‘made sense’ to confirm his commitment to the club before the end of the season, revealing it may aid the club’s transfer business in the summer.

Mbappe: ‘My mum loves Liverpool’

Just 24 days after those comments from the Reds manager, Mbappe admitted in an interview that he had held talks with the club.

“We talked a little bit, but not too much. We talked a little bit,’” Mbappe told The Telegraph. “I talked to Liverpool because it’s the favourite club of my mum; my mum loves Liverpool. I don’t know why, you will have to ask her.

“It’s a good club, and we met them five years ago (too). When I was in Monaco, I met them. It’s a big club.”

During those 2022 negotiations, the future of Klopp would undoubtedly have been discussed – with Mbappe a huge fan of the 57-year-old, whose sway over influencing any switch to the Premier League couldn’t be understated.

Speaking before Liverpool faced PSG in 2018, Klopp told RMC Sport: “I love him, to be honest. What a player he is and a nice lad as well, so he’s a really good kid. What a player, what a player.”

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His 2022 assessment that his personal contract extension aiding transfer business may have been a subtle hint to Mbappe, with talks ongoing at that time.

Big decision – Salah or Mbappe?

Liverpool would have also had to draw up replacements to cope with the potential dual loss of Mane and Salah, who were not only on higher wages than Firmino, but could each accrue a bigger fee.

The former joined Bayern Munich that June, with the latter very close to following his fellow winger out the exit door that same month.

Salah’s lawyer and advisor Ramy Abbas Issa told a 2023 Harvard Business School study that Liverpool were ‘very far’ apart in contract talks and he feared a breakthrough wouldn’t be reached.

Ultimately, in July, the Egyptian became the highest-paid player in the club’s history on wages worth more than £350,000-a-week.

Those figures would have been impossible to offer with Mbappe also on the books, and the delay in settling on terms wasn’t about arguing over the finer details.

As Salah’s agent said for the purposes of the Harvard study and reported by the Times: “Mohamed isn’t going to throw away his contract because of a 5 per cent difference in what we are asking for and what they are willing to give — it is much more than that.”

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Change of plans and new recruit

Let’s look at Liverpool’s incoming that summer, with only three senior arrivals prior to the panic deadline day loan for Arthur Melo.

Two of them were teenagers at the time, with right-back Calvin Ramsay arriving for £6.5m and Fabio Carvalho from Fulham.

The other was Darwin Nunez, who became the club’s record signing when he joined in June from Benfica in a deal worth up to £85m.

Liverpool are no strangers to shelling out on players they think are worth it, but every time before the Uruguayan came with more prep.

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The Reds had tracked Alisson Becker from his time at Brazilian side Internacional on the advice of their former star Doni before stumping up a world-record fee for a goalkeeper in 2018.

So sure was the club about Virgil van Dijk that they waited an extra six months after Southampton initially put a roadblock on any move rather than pivot to another defender.

Nunez, 22 at the time, had only two seasons of top-flight football under his belt but was required to demonstrate a similarly transformative effect on Liverpool’s attack that they had done in defence.

Except the landscape with Mane, Divock Origi and Takumi Minamino all leaving, and contract talks with Salah and Firmino at an impasse – with the latter leaving on a free the following summer – meant it was one the club couldn’t afford to take a gamble on to continue taking the fight to Manchester City, who had just unveiled Erling Haaland.

Yet Nunez, who couldn’t even understand Klopp and needed a translator, was billed as a long-term project who would need time to adapt in a way none of Liverpool’s other expensive signings had.

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His transfer was widely pushed by Klopp having been impressed with the striker’s performances for Benfica in their Champions League quarter-final tie with his side.

Nunez scored both home and away in Benfica’s 6-4 aggregate defeat to Liverpool in…you guessed it…April 2022.

Liverpool later went on to sign Cody Gakpo before the year was out for a fee between £35m and £45m, having avoided rivalling Manchester United and Leeds for his services six months earlier.

So that’s over £100m on two players capable of playing centrally as well as on the left, and almost £500k-a-week on wages with the cost of Nunez’s arrival and Salah’s renewal…

Maybe it all wasn’t so far-fetched after all?