The reason Real Madrid didn’t sign Kylian Mbappé after his trial as a teenager

Kylian Mbappé is all set to make his Real Madrid debut in Wednesday’s UEFA Super Cup against Atalanta. And to mark the occasion, DAZN has put together a mini-documentary, ‘El primer Kylian’ (’The first Kylian’), telling the story of when the former Paris Saint-Germain star had trials with the LaLiga giants as a 13-year-old in 2012.

Then Madrid youth team coach Rubén de la Red and academy players Luca Zidane and Juan Ángel Barea discuss the positive impression Mbappé left during his short spell training in the Spanish capital more than a decade ago, revealing that he was unable to stay “for non-sporting reasons”.

The teenager travelled to Spain in the hope of signing for the club of his dreams, brought over from France at the recommendation of club legend Zinedine Zidane.

“Skinny” Mbappé was “out of the ordinary”

Barea, who played for Real Madrid’s Cadete B team (for 14-15-year-olds) in 2012/13, trained alongside what he described as a “skinny” Mbappé. De la Red, who had just been appointed as an academy coach, tells a similar story. “He was a very thin, a small boy, and his muscles had not yet developed”.

Appearances, though, can be deceiving, as the young attacker showed in a match against the Cadete A team. “He was different, he had a lot of talent. He was really fast and had explosive strength. For our age, his qualities were out of the ordinary”, Barea continues. De la Red also compliments Mbappé's reading of the game at such a young age.

Luca Zidane, the Cadete B team goalkeeper and son of Zinedine, was Mbappé's interpreter as well as teammate. “There are lots of really good players in Real Madrid’s youth academy, but he seemed different. He had incredible power and was technically very good. You could see that he had something others didn’t have,” the current Granada goalkeeper explains.

Why didn’t Mbappé sign for Real Madrid as a teenager?

So if Mbappé made such an positive impact, why didn’t he sign for Real Madrid? “He didn’t stay for non-sporting reasons,” the younger Zidane reveals.

At the time, swapping France for Spain wasn’t a realistic option for the French youngster, who had never left the outskirts of Paris.

“The ones who did stay stayed for very specific reasons,“ says Barea. “Maybe they stood out far above the rest or the position they played in needed to be strengthened at that time of the season. But Kylian didn’t stay because of issues related to moving to a new country, with the language and his family”.

Future Barcelona star Neymar trained with Real Madrid

Intriguingly, the exact same thing happened with another player who went on to be a world star. “That also was the case with Neymar, who came to train with us. But many things have to come together. To agree to sign a player like that, you have to look at finances, family issues...”, de la Red explains.

12 years later, Mbappé's dream has become a reality. That 13-year-old boy has arrived at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu as a World Cup winner, the top scorer in PSG’s history and the French national team’s third highest scorer of all time.

Having scored 336 goals in his professional career to date, we can only assume plenty more will follow now that he will link up with the likes of Vinicius Junior and Jude Bellingham. The Ballon d’Or and Champions League have so far eluded the 25-year-old, although Real Madrid appears to offer the perfect platform for that to change.