The Brazilian and the World Cup winner moved to Paris in the same summer and spent six years as team-mates in the French capital. Neymar joined as the world’s most expensive player but many quickly saw Mbappe as the team’s leading light.

The Frenchman has flirted with a PSG departure over the years before the club pulled out all the stops to keep him, which included huge wages, signing on bonuses and a say over off pitch issues. Neymar departed last summer after failing to win the Champions League the club crave so badly.

There was often murmurs of internal rifts at the Parc des Princes and now Neymar has liked a post by influential Brazilian social media account Jogada Ensaiada, which has 189,000 followers on Instagram, and had the caption: “No player should be bigger than the institution.”

It posted a damning assessment about Mbappe’s influence at PSG and the state of the squad as a result. Despite that the Frenchman will be leaving the club and is likely to join Real Madrid, who have courted his services for several years.

The account said: “PSG, an example of football management. They knew how to bring together the best players and had the best team on the planet. When the team started to do well, the ego of a ‘certain Frenchman’ began to disturbed the atmosphere. Mbappe started to feel excluded, most of the team members spoke Spanish and he threatened to leave.

“To not lose his precious, PSG started selling those who did not were not aligned with Mbappe’s thoughts and brought in the French players he wanted. After doing everything to make everything go his way, Mbappe communicated to PSG that he would leave the club for free at the end of the season. And in the end, this is what remains at PSG.”

 

For a number of years PSG displayed their wealth by adding big names to their squad, which allowed them to dominate domestically, but didn’t land them the European Cup. Mbappe’s impending departure is poised to leave a huge void in their squad.

Current boss Luis Enrique has insisted that the club will come before any player. He said: “We’ve always said, ever since I arrived here six months ago, that the team is above everyone else, above all the individuals, and that’s the same policy for the whole club.”