Manchester United turned down an opportunity to sign Kylian Mbappé before he became a global superstar, after he failed to impress a scout more than a decade ago.

The story comes from ex-United player and coach Ryan Giggs, who has revealed being turned on to Mbappé by a stranger on a beach in the south of France some time in 2015.

Giggs, whose other recent revelation is that Pep Guardiola was so taken aback by a teenage Marcus Rashford that he’d have signed him for Manchester City, explained what happened during an appearance on Rio Ferdinand Presents The Debrief.

A man called Lionel followed Giggs, assistant manager to Louis van Gaal at Old Trafford at that time, as he walked along the beach back to his hotel and then approached him.

“He comes up to me and says, ‘Hi, I’m Lionel. I just wanted to just say hello. I’m a big United fan and a big fan of yours. But I watch a lot of youth football in France, and you have to look at this player. He’s called Kylian Mbappé. He’s at Monaco and I think he’s a player for Man United.’”

Man Utd Scout Watched 17-Year-Old Mbappe

Mbappé was potentially a new name to Manchester United at that time, although rumor has it that Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich all tried and failed to recruit him aged 14. Real Madrid’s early interest is well established. He chose Monaco.

A 16-year-old Mbappé was on the brink of Monaco’s first team in 2015 and debuted in Ligue 1 just over two weeks before his 17th birthday at the end of the calendar year. By then, Giggs had already roped in fellow assistant coach Albert Stuivenberg, now part of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal staff, and scouted Mbappé tapes from various Monaco youth matches.

Reflecting on what he saw in that game footage, Giggs said: “Wow, what is this? You can see players and they can be special, but he did look exceptional, obviously.”

He recalled: “We told the scouting team. Someone in France went to watch him and he was actually playing [against] PSG. Monaco were playing PSG. So they went to Paris to watch him.”

We can pinpoint that match as taking place on March 3, 2016, only Mbappé’s second ever Ligue 1 start and it resulted in just the second of two league defeats for PSG that entire season. Mbappé started on the right wing, his usual position in the early days, and played 81 minutes of the 2–0 Monaco victory. Fabinho, eventually of Liverpool, and Vágner Love, the colorful-haired Brazilian striker most famous for his time with CSKA Moscow, scored the goals.

Giggs said a few weeks passed before he caught up with the verdict: “I said to this guy, ‘How did it go?’ He went, ‘Yeah, they weren’t too sure about him, so we just left it,’ and that was it.”

Missed Opportunity to Pursue Era-Defining Star

There are, of course, no guarantees that Mbappé—or Monaco—would have accepted an approach from Manchester United. But it’s worth noting that an exciting attack spearheaded by the veteran Zlatan Ibrahimović and supported by emerging youngsters Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial was developing at that time. The latter also had recent, direct experience of leaving Monaco for the Premier League and was himself considered a superstar in the making.

Paul Pogba, another French star, joined in 2016 for a world-record fee and there was general optimism surrounding the club as serial winner José Mourinho also arrived as manager.

It was the following season in 2016–17 that Mbappé had his true breakout, establishing himself with Monaco and getting 39 goals and assists in 44 appearances across all competitions. That Monaco team beat PSG to the Ligue 1 title and reached the Champions League semifinals, with a newly 18-year-old Mbappé finding the net six times in six knockout matches—including home and away against Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the round of 16.

By then, United had missed the boat. PSG, in the same window the club broke the world transfer record by triggering Neymar’s Barcelona release clause, agreed a deal with Monaco to take Mbappé on loan with an obligation to buy in 2018. The €180 million fee ($209 million at today’s rate) is still the second biggest of all time. Finances aside, the call of home was strong. Mbappé was born in Paris and raised in the suburbs to the northeast of the city.

Mbappé scored 256 goals in 308 PSG appearances across seven seasons and is already closing in on 100 goals for Real Madrid after getting his 91st in the early weeks of just his third season in the Spanish capital. He is both France’s and the World Cup’s all-time leading goalscorer, and at the age of 27 still has a lot of soccer left to play.