The Kylian Mbappe saga shows that in sport, everyone can be bought

The Saudi appetite for sport is growing ever more rapacious, writes Jim White, but signing Mbappe would symbolise more than that: it’s about attaining international prestige and power

The really extraordinary thing about Saudi club Al-Hilal reportedly offering a record €300m fee is how unsurprising it is (AP)

When Trevor Francis was signed by Nottingham Forest in February 1979 for one million pounds, it is hard to overstate the reaction across Britain. It was as if someone had taken a gun to Bambi.

Questions were asked in parliament, sermons were preached from church pulpits, newspaper editorials fulminated: everywhere there was consternation that an individual could be valued at more than his own body weight in gold. On BBC radio, the commentator Peter Jones suggested that it was such an economically unsustainable concept, it was unlikely such a sum would ever be paid again.

There is a rich irony that on the very day the first Englishman to command a seven figure fee died, Jones’s prediction was proven once again to be decidedly off the mark. Because, as it was announced that Francis had suffered a fatal heart attack in his home in Spain, the Saudi Arabian club Al-Hilal offered 259 times as much as he had cost in the attempt to sign the French forward Kylian Mbappe from Paris Saint-Germain. And here’s the thing about such an extraordinary valuation: given where it has come from, nobody seems particularly surprised.