The summer transfer window is a ritual soap opera that sometimes borders on reality TV, with its crudely scripted daily twists. Football has even borrowed the name “loft”, in reference to the M6 program which had popularized the genre in France, to designate a practice (the dismissal by the clubs of the players from whom they intend to separate) which can thus be dated from the beginning of the 2000s.
It was Olympique de Marseille which had inaugurated this transposition, at the time of Bernard Tapie II, when the sports director had transformed the training center of La Commanderie into a station hall. With about fifty movements in the summer of 2001, it was necessary to remove the undesirables from training in order to push them at the start.
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Humanly and legally dubious, this operation spread as clubs accumulated players in their (over)staff, the context being the frenzy of transfers and the transformation of footballers into financial assets. At the risk of weighing down payrolls and deadlocking employees just asking to honor their contract.
A shortfall and annoyance
It is rare for very great players to be declared supernumerary in this way. This is also not quite the case with Kylian Mbappé, to whom PSG refused boarding with his teammates for the summer tour in Japan, like Julian Draxler, Colin Dagba, Georginio Wijnaldum, Abdou Diallo or Leandro Paredes, whom the club wants to get rid of.
In this standoff, the club wants to force Mbappé to exercise the option which would extend his contract for one year, until 2025, or to conclude a transfer to another club this summer. The objective is to avoid a free departure in a year, that is to say without compensation to be paid for the future team of the captain of the Blues. For the Parisian leaders, who suspect the player and Real Madrid of having already agreed, seeing Mbappé leave like this, for free, in June 2024, would be as much a loss of profit as an annoyance.
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Trapped in its policy of recruiting stars, PSG wants to promote the one who, unlike Lionel Messi or Neymar Jr., has held its rank and “worth” currently more than 160 million euros, according to the Football Observatory’s assessment. To see the striker slip away to Real Madrid without getting anything in return would be the worst possible operation for Paris. Though. The worst would be that the player sees himself imposing a white season if everyone remains on their positions – he would remain an employee of PSG but would not participate in any match – and leave at the end.
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