Kylian Mbappe held talks with Liverpool aboard a private jet as he considered joining the Reds from Monaco in 2017, Jurgen Klopp has revealed.
Mbappe burst onto the scene with Monaco between 2015 and 2017, scoring 27 goals in 60 appearances – only 35 of which were starts – before moving to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017.
Having initially joined the Paris giants on loan before making that move permanent the following year, he went on to plunder 256 goals in 308 outings for the club, winning 15 trophies including six Ligue 1 titles.
Mbappe then, of course, moved onto Madrid, where he has scored 86 goals in 103 games across two wildly successful individual seasons, albeit without winning LaLiga, the Champions League or the Copa del Rey.
But things could have been so different had he opted for a move to the Premier League nine years ago.
Following France’s 2-0 World Cup quarter-final win over Morocco, in which Mbappe scored, assisted and had a penalty saved, he was seen embracing Klopp amid the post-match celebrations.
And Klopp – who is widely expected to become Germany’s new head coach after spending the World Cup working as a pundit for MagentaTV – subsequently revealed he had tried to lure Mbappe to Anfield.
“We flew from Blackpool to Nice. In Nice, the entire Mbappe family boarded a private jet with five rooms… we really went all out,” he told MagentaTV.
“Then we flew around in a circle, talked with the family, ate good food. We couldn’t be seen. We flew in a circle. It was fantastic… and then he went to Paris!”
11 – Kylian Mbappé has been involved in 11 goals at the 2026 World Cup (8 goals, 3 assists).
That’s the most by a player in a single edition since 🇩🇪 Gerd Müller in 1970 (10 goals, 3 assists).
Productive. pic.twitter.com/sJ6P4jU2dL
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) July 9, 2026
Mbappe’s talismanic display against Morocco saw him become the first player to reach 10 or more goal involvements at two different editions of the World Cup (eight goals and two assists in 2022, eight goals and three assists in 2026), since records began in 1966.
His feat of scoring, assisting and seeing a penalty saved made him the second player to do all three in a World Cup game in three days, after Argentina icon Lionel Messi versus Egypt. Throughout the last 60 years, there have only been four cases of players doing so in total.
