Leipzig director: Club nearly signed 16-year-old Mbappe

One thing that never goes out of style in football is hindsight.

At the moment, Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe is the fashionable topic of retrospective regret, and RB Leipzig sporting director Ralf Rangnick is the latest to admit to nearly signing the 18-year-old goal-machine.

"We had Kylian Mbappe all but signed," Rangnick told Bild, courtesy of Sky Sports about the Bundesliga side's advances whilst still in the second tier.

Leipzig's rapid ascension from its energy-drink funded inception in 2009 and a spot in the fifth-tier of German football to a runner's-up standing last year and Champions League berth has mirrored Mbappe's meteoric rise. Alas, it wasn't to be as the managerial vacancy at the club on the heels of Alexander Zorniger's sacking in February 2015 warded off the Mbappe clan.

"The problem was we had just parted ways with Alexander Zorniger. We didn't know at the time who would be our coach and how it would continue," Rangnick added

Rangnick, who would be appointed manager in July 2015 after Achim Beierlorzer's 39 days in charge, admits that Mbappe's father was still interested in the move to Germany if the current sporting director was named gaffer. Rangnick was assured by Mbappe's father "that I would be coach, that he would entrust me with the boy immediately. But I couldn't give him that promise already in February (2015)."

In the end, Mbappe joined Monaco's famed academy before a switch to the capital as the world's second-most expensive player, and Leipzig developed it's own stable of young talent with shrewd moves for the likes of Timo Werner, Naby Keita, and Emil Forsberg.