MESSI IS CITY’S GOLDEN TICKET
Sign Messi and Pep’s City would be the hottest ticket in town, home and away!
I’LL BUY you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel all right, The Beatles sang. And in their transfer splurges over the last decade and more, Manchester City have bought diamond rings aplenty: David Silva, Raheem Sterling and Kevin De Bruyne have sparkled with beauty and brilliance. There is still one thing that has remained just beyond the club’ s grasp in its new incarnation but if they snag Lionel Messi, that will change. Money can’t buy you love. But Messi can.
If City can make real what once seemed to belong to fantasy and prise Messi from Barcelona’s increasingly clammy clutch, he would be the final piece in the jigsaw they started putting together in 2008, when Sheik Man sour bought the club and began to transform it into one of Europe’s leading sides. If Messi plays for City, it legitimises at a stroke everything they have built. No other player could bestow this but Messi can.
Sure, City have had our admiration for sometime now. The Pep Guardiola teams that won back-toback Premier League titles in 2018 and 2019 played some of the best football we have ever seen in this country. Sometimes, it was breathtaking. Its ambition and its execution and its technical accomplishment were on a different level to much of what went before. It was a privilege to watch.
But beyond the club’s own fans, the admiration never quite translated into love. There is a feeling among City supporters, certainly, that for all their success — perhaps because of their success — they have never quite been granted the respect or the status they deserved.
There is a feeling that what they have achieved has only been recognised begrudgingly. They saw the fervour that greeted Liverpool’s title triumph last season and they felt like outsiders again.
Some denigrate them still as an ‘oil club’. There are plenty of critics who cannot look past the fact that they are fuelled by the billions of Abu Dhabi and who see state ownership of football clubs as a line that should never have been crossed.
It puts City, supposedly, at an ideological disadvantage to clubs like Bayern Munich and Juventus. City sense that disdain wherever they turn, both at home and in UEFA’s club elite, which resents
City openly as a threat to its gerontocracy. One way for City to crash through the barrier is to win the Champions League but that competition appears to have become a mental block for both the club and Guardiola, who freeze in its headlights.
The old giants keep winning it, Bayern and Real Madrid and Liverpool and Barcelona. And City stay on the outside, every year their longing a little greater.
The other way through is Messi. If City have a mental block about the Champions League, having Messi in their side would unblock it. There are bound to be more twists and turns in the saga of his departure from the Nou Camp but his discontent with the club seems to have moved beyond a power play to get rid of the president.
He wants to leave and he wants to go to City. So buy him, inherit him, haggle for him, instruct lawyers, pay legal fees, do whatever has to be done. Because with Messi, City suddenly become everyone’ s favourite team. They move up a level. Some of the football they play should have earned them that kind of affection anyway but with Messi in the side, it would be guaranteed. Everybody loves Messi because he epitomises the beauty of football and with him in their team, everyone would love City, too.
MESSI would enable City to gatecrash the old boys’ network. The walls would come tumbling down. To get him from Barcelona, where everyone thought he would play his whole career, would be the transfer coup of our lifetimes. The best player in the world, perhaps the greatest player there has ever been, at City. It would bring the club the kind of gravitas and kudos and profile that has been denied them until now.
Despite everything they have achieved and the way they have achieved it, City are still patronised. They are still treated, by some who do not know t heir history, as parochial impostors, arrivistes amid the aristocracy. Messi would change that. No more ‘Emptyhad’ jibes with Messi in the team. Those days would be gone. City would be the hottest ticket in town for every match, home and away. They would be the cats who got the cream.
There is no point pretending that he would be a long-term solution for City. Messi turned 33 earlier this summer. He is, sadly, past the peak of his career. Maybe he has two years left at the top. Maybe three. It doesn’t matter. It’s long enough. It’s long enough to make the difference for City and take them the final step to winning the Champions League. Unlike at Barcelona, City have all the support cast he needs.
It seems criminal that Messi has only won Europe’s biggest club prize once since he was 24. In some ways, Barcelona wasted his peak years by allowing the club to become more and more dependent upon him and camouflaging their complacency and their failures in recruitment with his genius.
It is said that he is desperate to add to his tally of Champions League wins and, in City, he has a team that is ready to go. He would not be part of a rebuilding project. City don’t need fixing. They need one final push to convert them from Champions League wannabes into the real deal, a European dynasty. Not many players could flick that switch. But Messi can.