Kylian Mbappe impasse a serious impediment for PSG and Luis Enrique

In his second job as a senior coach, Luis Enrique wanted to be able to look down on his players. Literally.

He thought the club who had offered him a first chance to manage in Spain’s first division, Celta Vigo, had insufficient aerial cameras to monitor practice sessions, so he asked that an observation tower be constructed next to the main training pitch.

Up the scaffolding he would climb, “to get a view of the guys from another angle,” he explained. Another benefit was that, seated high above his subjects, he left his players in no doubt who was at the top of the decision-making hierarchy, who was boss.

Ten years on from his season at Celta, Luis Enrique is feeling his way into a job notorious for eroding the status of the head coach: Paris Saint-Germain, where his three immediate predecessors have found that the authority of the role diminishes ever more rapidly.

Christophe Galtier, sacked earlier this month, lasted less than a year, Mauricio Pochettino 18 months. In that descending scale of longevity Thomas Tuchel’s 912-day reign until late 2020 looks epochal.

So far in Luis Enrique’s opening 22 days of a three-year contract he has learnt painfully that, as a PSG head coach, you can feel small when caught between the twin towers of PSG’s power base: on the one hand, the club president Nasser Al Khelaifi, boss of how the club’s Qatari owners manage their large investment; and, on the other, Kylian Mbappe, the player to whom the largest single tranche of the club’s salaries are channelled.

As PSG continue their pre-season preparations in Japan, Mbappe is effectively up for sale as long as he continues to refuse the contract extension to 2025 the club have offered him. And he’s well out of sight of any observational