What if Messi joined Man City in 2021?

Lionel Messi stood on the Camp Nou pitch in tears, a Barcelona shirt pulled over his face, the cameras feeding his anguish to every corner of the footballing world. A boy who had arrived from Rosario at 13, the architect of the greatest dynasty in modern club football, forced out not by choice but by chaos. And yet, in the summer of 2021, when Paris prepared its Eiffel Tower unveiling, there was another road open, another story waiting to be written in sky blue.

What if Messi had gone to Manchester City?

The romance of Pep Guardiola and Messi was irresistible. Pep had left Barcelona in 2012, but he never stopped speaking of Messi as if he were both a son and a solution. The thought of reuniting in Manchester had hovered over both men for years. And in 2021, City were ready. Sheikh Mansour’s empire had the money, the machinery, the need for one more piece of footballing perfection. Pep’s City were already a well-oiled supercar, but imagine what happens when you slot in the greatest engine of all.

Instead of Messi’s Parisian debut against Reims, picture him stepping out at the Etihad on a cool August evening, his name on the back of that pristine sky blue shirt. Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden, Riyad Mahrez, Jack Grealish - suddenly orbiting around him like satellites. A team built to suffocate opponents with possession, now armed with a player who could both finish and unlock everything in a single pass.

Would it have worked? The Premier League is a different beast, a faster, rougher animal than La Liga. But Messi had spent years dismantling English sides in the Champions League. Remember the 2011 final at Wembley, his shot fizzing low past Edwin van der Sar as if guided by magnetism. Imagine that, every week, against Burnley, against Chelsea, against United. The questions about whether he could “do it on a cold night in Stoke” feel childish now he did it in Rome, in London, in Madrid, against the world’s best.

The biggest ripple effect might have been City in Europe. That season, they lost the Champions League semi-final to Real Madrid in a collapse of biblical proportions. With Messi on the pitch, the narrative shifts. The calm, the ruthless edge, the certainty that if you give him one moment, he punishes you. City’s obsession with the European Cup, forever the itch they couldn’t quite scratch, may have been soothed in 2022 rather than 2023. Messi lifting the Champions League again under Pep, that image alone could have rewritten legacies.

And then there’s the Premier League itself. Cristiano Ronaldo returned to Manchester United that same summer, sparking the great nostalgia play. How different would the headlines have been if Messi had joined City at the same time? The two titans, not in Spain this time but in Manchester, separated by a few miles of motorway. The derby would have become a global event of unprecedented magnitude - a footballing Cold War fought under floodlights in the North West.

Instead, we got Messi in Paris, a Champions League project that fizzled more than it burned, and a World Cup win that cemented his immortality. But part of you wonders - how would English football have absorbed him, celebrated him, tested him? The best player of all time in the most relentless league in the world. Pep and Leo, together again, painting England sky blue.

It never happened. But the dream of it lingers, a tantalising vision of a world just slightly out of reach.