Kylian Mbappé vs Paris Saint-Germain

Mo Salah is staying in the Premier League. The Egyptian forward yesterday announced a two-year contract extension at table-topping Liverpool FC.

It’s another welcome boost for English football, coming a few weeks after Erling Haaland penned a new deal at Manchester City. The pair are the league’s greatest international marketing assets, although some of us would argue Jean-Philippe Mateta is rapidly making up ground.

Salah, who had been coveted by teams in Saudi Arabia, is also one of only three players to make the top ten for both goals and assists in Premier League history. Email us if you know the other two.

You won’t see Scoreboard in your inbox next weekend — we are taking a break for Easter.

Before then, we’re weighing up the rising cost of watching top-level tennis. Plus, we’re looking at an epic battle between two of the most powerful people in football. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

Mbappé goes studs up on Paris Saint-Germain

Kylian Mbappé’s week was pretty full on. His Real Madrid side slumped to a 3-0 defeat away at Arsenal in the Uefa Champions League. Two days later, the French star’s lawyers were escalating a legal onslaught against his former club, Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain.

On the surface, the legal dispute is a classic of the ‘player versus club’ genre, as Mbappé, 26, fights to recover €55mn in wages and bonuses he claims he is owed by PSG.

But Mbappé is no ordinary player, and PSG no ordinary club. The fight pits arguably the world’s top footballer against one of the game’s most powerful decision makers.

Mbappé was more than just PSG’s best player. He was a marketing machine for Qatar. He wore shirts emblazoned with flag carrier Qatar Airways, flew to Doha for promotional activities, and starred as France narrowly lost the 2022 Fifa World Cup.

At club level, the French forward led PSG through years of domestic domination, even if the Champions League eluded them. PSG invested heavily in Mbappé, signing him from Monaco for €180mn in 2017 and paying him handsomely along the way.

The player’s clout in France is unrivalled. When Mbappé first tried to leave for Real Madrid in 2022, it wasn’t just PSG fans who took notice. French President Emmanuel Macron intervened and helped convince him to stay put.

But relations between player and club didn’t remain cordial for long. Mbappé sought to leave once again, and was benched. To expedite his departure, PSG claims the player had agreed — verbally — to forgo the money now at the centre of the legal fight.

PSG says this took the form of a gentleman’s agreement between Mbappé and club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who also chairs Qatar Sports Investments and sits on the board of the Qatar Investment Authority, the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund.

Al-Khelaifi, who has known the Emir of Qatar since childhood, is a powerful figure in sports. He chairs the influential European Club Association (ECA) and represents the body on the executive committee of European football governing body Uefa.

And therein lies another subplot to the current drama. Real Madrid, Mbappé’s current home, was the architect of the failed European Super League. Al-Khelaifi was arguably its chief saboteur — his decision to oppose the project helped vault the former tennis player into football’s innermost political circle.

Since Mbappé’s departure, PSG has accelerated a shift away from superstars towards youth development and a team-first ethos. The new strategy is so far paying off, PSG looks far more likely to reach the semifinals of the Champions League than Mbappé’s Real Madrid, and has already bagged this year’s French league title.

Yet Mbappé is unbowed. At a press conference in Paris announcing criminal and civil suits on Thursday, one of his lawyers, Thomas Clay, said: “I remind you that Kylian Mbappé is the captain of the French national team, he’s the highest scorer in the history of the club and that he is owed a bit of recognition: that is to say, that he is paid his salary.”

PSG, however, said that Mbappé’s version of events had come from a “parallel universe of fanciful storytelling” and questioned why the player had refused an “amicable solution”.

Players are increasingly flexing their muscles off the pitch. But the outcome of a legal fight between a superstar and a superclub could reset the boundaries of where power truly lies.

Wimbledon debentures: a luxury gold rush

This week the All England Lawn Tennis Club kicked off its latest sale of debentures — five-year tickets to the Wimbledon Championships, with access to Number 1 Court and some premium hospitality areas.

As the only re-sellable tickets for the oldest Grand Slam, these are highly sought after. Strong demand has been reflected in the 59 per cent price increase. Debentures running from 2027-31 will cost £73,000, up from £46,000 last time they went on sale in 2021. Are they worth it?

On at least one metric, they are a no brainer. Debentures are freely tradeable assets regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, so we can see what they go for in the secondary market. The existing No.1 Court debentures currently trade at £36,000, despite only having two editions of the tournament — or 22 days of tennis — left to go. That’s around £1,635 per day to attend. The new issues come with 55 days of tennis, so £1,330 per day.

The most recent Centre Court debentures last traded at £108,000, having been issued at £116,000. But buyer beware: that price doesn’t account for £87,000 of payments still due from the original sale. So savvy (and liquid) investors could have made a pretty sweet return on investment of 270 per cent by buying at issue, making the initial £29,000 payment and then flipping.

But what if you buy them because you actually want to watch tennis, but for some reason can’t? The AELTC will repurchase seats from you, with prices varying depending on the day. Reselling your ticket for the opening Monday at this summer’s Championships, for example, will get you £700 in return, although later days are priced at £1,000. You could also resell your spot for the whole period for £9,000, an average of £818 per day.

Wealthy tennis fans have options. A single day of entry-level hospitality with a guaranteed spot on Court No.1 is still available at just over £1,200, although the prized debenture seats go for double that. Fine dining at the Le Gavroche pop-up will set you back closer to £3,000, although that is already sold out. Clearly gourmand tennis lovers have deep pockets.

Resale sites, such as Green & Purple, currently offer No.1 Court debenture seats starting at roughly £2,000 a head. For comparison, that’s more than even the highest rung of hospitality currently on sale for Premier League games at Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur, and demonstrates that the raging appetite for luxurious sporting days out has yet to abate.

For tennis fans who simply cannot bear to miss a moment of the action (but only on No.1 Court and so not including the semi-finals or the finals), debentures appear to offer reasonable value compared to the alternatives.

But really these products seem to function best as cold-hearted investments, with potentially lucrative returns.

For the AELTC, they serve two important functions. For one, they offer a backdoor for rich fans (and tourists) to gain access to the prestigious tournament — helping it to maintain exclusivity without being completely inaccessible. The gilded walls are high, but there’s champagne on the other side.

More importantly, it allows the club to generate a heap of cash to spend on infrastructure investment, such as its planned expansion into Wimbledon Park. The AELTC aims to raise £75mn from the new issue, adding to the almost £240mn it raised last year from Centre Court debentures. That’s quite the war chest.

Highlights

• Sir Jim Ratcliffe continued with his overhaul of Ineos Sport, withdrawing from the next edition of the America’s Cup yacht race after falling out with champion sailor Sir Ben Ainslie.

• Formula 1 is encountering lukewarm media appetite for its US television rights, according to the Wall Street Journal. The car racing series’ deal with ESPN expires at the end of the year, but media companies are reluctant to shell out $150mn to $180mn a year — versus the roughly $85mn fee at present — to secure the right to screen F1 from the beginning of next season.

Transfer Market

Tottenham Hotspur has hired the former chief executive of arch-rivals Arsenal FC. Vinai Venkatesham will join Spurs this summer, in a move that will send shockwaves through the Premier League. There is no love lost between fans of Arsenal and Spurs. Just ask former defender Sol Campbell, who is still detested by Spurs fans for moving to Arsenal in his playing days.

“The club has experienced significant growth in recent years, making it crucial to expand our executive management,” said Spurs executive chair Daniel Levy. “I have known Vinai for many years, having worked together in the Premier League and the ECA. I am personally delighted that he has agreed to join our board as we build for success.”

Venkatesham worked for Arsenal for 14 years until mid-2024. He is a non-executive director of the British Olympic Association and worked on the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Final Whistle

Declan Rice’s heroics for Arsenal against Real Madrid in the Champions League take some beating.

The England midfielder banged in two goals, becoming the first player in the history of the competition to score two direct free-kicks in a knockout match.

Rice was the undisputed player of the match. His goals have been set to Titanic’s theme music, drawn adulation from fans, and what’s more astonishing is that he waited until his 339th appearance as a professional footballer to score from a free kick.

Not bad timing.