This summer PSG got into a particularly interesting stand-off with the real Mbappé (not the one I bought with Sedan):

• He has one year left on his contract: if the player doesn’t extend and isn’t sold, he’ll see out his fixed-term contract and leave for free.
• To force the player to accept a sale or sign a new deal, PSG froze him out of the squad.

The problem is that freezing him out could cost PSG dearly. Someone close to the professional players’ union tells me Mbappé’s lawyer was ready to take the matter to the LFP (the body that runs Ligue 1), then to the employment tribunal. Because being dropped from the squad was only part of the reprisals for refusing to sign a new contract, which the courts would very obviously punish.

That’s the whole difference between the asset, which is the potential transfer, and the employee, which is the clown on the pitch.

In fact, last March, Hatem Ben Arfa, a former France international, won a case against that very same PSG for… exactly the same reason.

All summer long, the club deliberately blurred the line between the two “entities” by talking up its possibly difficult financial situation.

In that case, the club warned, it would have to sell players, rethink its policy of bringing young players into the first team […] and very probably launch a wave of redundancies.

The employee was eventually brought back into the squad in August.