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While Manchester City were playing out a rather dour 0-0 draw with Sporting Lisbon on Wednesday evening, one of the great Champions League nights was playing out a couple of thousand of kilometers away in Madrid.
Karim Benzema scored a 17-minute second-half hat-trick to earn Real Madrid a 3-2 aggregate win over Paris Saint-Germain, a remarkable comeback given that the French side held a two-goal advantage with 30 minutes left to play.
Imploding on Europe’s biggest stage is nothing new for PSG but this collapse may have the lasting impact of persuading one of football’s best attackers that his future lies elsewhere.
Kylian Mbappe’s current PSG contract expires in June and it is widely believed that he will join Real Madrid on a free this summer. The two goals that he scored over the two legs against his potential future employers added some spice to the saga, but with PSG once again falling short of expectations, it seems certain that he will leave.
Before the match at the Bernabeu, BT Sport’s Rio Ferdinand had a quick chat with the 23-year-old forward. Given what Mbappe said, there may be a sense of regret at City that the Blues never managed to sign him themselves.
Pep Guardiola wanted to make the then-teenager one of his first signings when he arrived at City in 2016 but Mbappe ended up staying at Monaco. A year later – months after Mbappe had helped Monaco knock City out of the Champions League – Pep held talks with him but he opted to join PSG instead.
It’s a ‘what could have been’ moment’; Mbappe would have been incredible in a Guardiola team.
The France international may be best known for blitzing past defenders and scoring tonnes of goals – he’s scored 157 in 206 appearances for PSG – but his abilities off the ball and movement, in particular, would have delighted Guardiola.
Pointing to a monitor showing a clip of Mbappe dragging a defender around while waiting for the ball to come, Ferdinand asked the striker what he was doing.
“I want to create the space,” he said. “I know Marco [Verratti] wanted me to go there, but I don’t want to go there directly, I want to do some movement before to create fake space, to go, to come back…
