Manchester City came close to signing Lionel Messi in 2020 after talks between the player and Pep Guardiola
“Hi Pep, how are you?”
That was all the message said, but it was all Pep Guardiola needed to know that Lionel Messi was interested in joining Manchester City in August 2020. Sergio Aguero had already sounded an alert given his closeness to the player, yet Guardiola was in too much of a funk after City’s limp Champions League exit to Lyon in the middle of the pandemic.
Those five words snapped him to his senses though, and a day later Guardiola met Messi in his home in Barcelona for both men to size each other up. Six hours later, the player was convinced about the move and the manager was committed to extending his contract at the Etihad.
The deal of course did not end up happening, with Messi ultimately opting against an ugly scrap with his boyhood club. However, the level of detail that went into the preparations for it have been revealed in Marti Perarnau’s book The Pep Revolution.
Following on from talks with Messi at his home, Guardiola headed back to Manchester with assistant coach Juanma Lillo and the pair worked out on the plane how the superstar would fit into the City side. Essentially, he would be stationed in the centre-circle when City didn’t have the ball in order to force opponents wide, and then bring everyone up to the box with him when they were in possession.
News of Messi’s potential move emerged, as the Manchester Evening News reported at the time, and as Guardiola was planning he received a message from Bernardo Silva asking if the news was true. When asked how he would feel about it, Silva replied: “I’d run twice as much!”
As part of his comprehensive look across seven seasons in Manchester, Perarnau chronicles how news of Messi staying with Barcelona left Guardiola too despondent to even take training at the City Football Academy before he picked himself up and found the motivation to lead City into one of their best ever seasons.
