The National Union of Professional Footballers of France (UNFP) has criticized Paris Saint-Germain for excluding Kylian Mbappe from their pre-season trip to Asia.
The decision was made by the Ligue 1 champions as a contract dispute between the striker and the club continues to drag on.
According to rumors in the media, PSG has made the 24-year-old France captain available for purchase after relations between the two parties deteriorated over the course of the previous month.
Mbappe has already said that he will not extend his contract, which is set to expire at the conclusion of the next season. Because of this, he will be able to leave the club for free in June of 2024.
However, President of PSG Nasser Al-Khelaifi has said that they would not allow Mbappe, who has finished as the top scorer in the French top division for each of the last five seasons, to go for free.
“These players – all of them – must enjoy the same working conditions as the rest of the professional workforce,” the UNFP, the primary labor organization for professional football players in France, stated in a long statement on Saturday. The statement was released on the same day as the match.
“The UNFP believes it would be helpful to remind managers that placing pressure on an employee – by, for example, deteriorating their working circumstances – to compel them to quit their job or accept what the employer wants constitutes moral harassment, which is strongly condemned by French law. Specifically, the UNFP believes it would be important to remind managers that moral harassment is illegal in France.
According to the statement, “So, yes, the UNFP reserves the right to take civil and criminal action against any club that behaves in this way,”
PSG’s domestic success has not been matched in the Champions League, a trophy the Parisian club has never won despite all of their investment in the team. PSG have won nine of the previous 11 championships in Ligue 1, but their domestic success has not been matched in the Champions League.
PSG is in a difficult position because if they let Mbappe play out the last year of his contract, they would not be able to recuperate any of the 180 million euros ($200.2 million) that they paid in 2017 to lure him away from AS Monaco.
Mbappe’s name has been brought up in connection with a possible transfer to Real Madrid, who have won the European Cup a record 14 times.