Sometimes the most revealing transfer stories are not the ones that end with a signing, but the ones that show just how far a club was willing to go. Jurgen Klopp has now added another layer to Liverpool's long pursuit of Kylian Mbappé, saying the club arranged a private jet and food for the player and his family in 2017 before the move collapsed.
Klopp described it as the club's “most expensive non-transfer,” a blunt way of capturing a chase that never quite reached the finish line. At the time, Liverpool were trying to convince an 18-year-old Mbappé to head to Merseyside, and they clearly treated the deal as more than a routine recruitment pitch.
A serious attempt that never landed
The details matter because they show Liverpool did not simply admire Mbappé from a distance. Klopp said the club “really went all out” and that they flew around in a circle, talked with the family and ate good food. In other words, this was a fully staged effort to make the case in person, not a speculative inquiry from afar.
But the ending was the familiar one for almost every club that has tried to sign him. In 2017, Mbappé joined Paris St-Germain on loan with an option for the move to become permanent for 180m euros. For Liverpool, it became a reminder that even an ambitious club on the rise could lose out when the market is chasing a player of that level.
What Liverpool missed
The scale of the near miss looks even bigger now. Mbappé is 27, has scored 20 World Cup goals, and is only one behind Lionel Messi. He left Paris in 2024 after seven years and moved to Real Madrid, while Klopp quit Liverpool the same year after nine years on Merseyside, having won a Champions League and a Premier League title.
That context matters. Klopp's Liverpool were already a serious force, but Mbappé was still young enough to reshape a project. Instead, Paris St-Germain got the deal, and Liverpool were left with one of the more expensive near-misses in recent transfer history.
Klopp was speaking before France beat Morocco to reach the World Cup semi-finals, while working for Magenta TV as a pundit. That timing gave the story an added edge: Mbappé was once a transfer target, and now he is a global star whose career has long since moved far beyond the original pitch.
The lesson is not just that Liverpool missed out. It is that they were close enough to try everything, including a private jet, only for Mbappé to choose Paris St-Germain anyway.
