The 23-year-old French national was widely expected to leave the Ligue 1 winners at the end of the season, with his current contract set to expire on 30 June.

Kylian Mbappe has chosen to remain at Paris Saint-Germain, rejecting a transfer to Real Madrid.

Real Madrid, the La Liga winners and Champions League finalists, were allegedly close to finalising a deal with Mbappe until his abrupt U-turn. The World Cup champion, who joined PSG from Monaco for €180 million in 2017, was set to leave on a free transfer when his current contract expired.

The Madrid-based football club who were willing to pay €230 million for Mbappe on Deadline Day last summer, were prepared to offer him a signing-on fee of £110 million and salary of £20 million per year after tax. Their entire investment would have cost almost £300 million.

Mbappe grew up supporting Los Blancos and claims that playing for them has always been his dream. He still hopes to play for them in the future.

His signing marks a triumph for PSG’s Qatari owner Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who hopes that the French forward will be one of the faces of the Qatar World Cup.

PSG is said to have offered Mbappe a monthly salary of £4 million, which would make him the highest-paid player in the league.

An extension would also bring in a massive signing-on fee of almost £100 million, with image right concessions as well as bonuses for goals, Ballon d’Or award honours and Champions League wins.

Mbappe expressed his happiness over staying at PSG after he and club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi revealed the striker’s new contract, on the Parc des Princes field before PSG’s last Ligue 1 match of the season against Metz.

“I am convinced that here I can continue to grow within a club that gives itself all the means to perform at the highest level,” Mbappe said in a club statement. “I am also very happy to be able to continue playing in France, the country where I was born, grew up and flourished.”

The announcement enraged Spain’s La Liga, which called the transaction “scandalous” and said it would lodge a complaint with UEFA, as well as French and EU authorities.

“This type of agreement threatens the economic sustainability of European football,” read a La Liga statement, adding that it put “hundreds of thousands of jobs and sporting integrity at risk in the medium term, not only from European competitions, but also from our domestic leagues”.

The president of Spain’s La Liga, Javier Tebas, has been a vocal critic of high-spending European teams like PSG and Manchester City, as well as the proposed European Super League.

PSG lost €224.3 million in the 2020-21 season, according to a report released earlier this month by the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), the governing body of the French professional leagues.

This followed a loss of €124.2 million in 2019-20, when the Ligue 1 season was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.