Manchester City aren’t negotiating a deal to sign Barcelona forward Lionel Messi this summer, according to Simon Stone of BBC Sport.
Messi has been linked with a move away from the Camp Nou when his contract expires in June, with reports suggesting the Premier League club has already tabled an offer.
However, City haven’t offered the Argentine superstar a contract and have no plans to open negotiations, a source told Stone.
Speculation over the 33-year-old’s future has intensified with Barcelona’s Champions League campaign on the brink of ending. Messi’s side suffered a 4-1 loss in the first leg of its last-16 meeting with Paris Saint-Germain, who are also considered favorites to land the six-time Ballon d’Or winner.
Messi stunned the football world last summer when news surfaced that he wanted to leave Barcelona. City were considered the front-runners to sign him before he decided to stay for one more season to avoid a legal battle with the Catalan side.
Though City were heavily linked with Messi last summer, they didn’t make an offer to sign him, Stone reports.
Barcelona boss Ronald Koeman said earlier this month he’s “not confident” about Messi’s future at the club. The Dutch manager revealed his doubt just days after Messi’s €555-million contract was controversially leaked to the press.
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters says the proposal for a European Super League is “destructive to the value of domestic football across Europe,” according to the Financial Times’ Murad Ahmed and Samuel Agini.
The possibility of a Super League being created for the continent’s elite clubs has been regularly reported as UEFA works on a revised Champions League structure in time for the 2024-25 campaign. The potential breakaway competition would be an alternative to the Champions League.
The Super League would cost an estimated $6 million to create. It would center around 15 or more clubs, which would receive between €100 million and €350 million for joining after being invited into the competition based on the teams’ historical standing. There would be no risk of these founding members being relegated from the Super League.
“Any proposal that I’ve read about or heard about doesn’t have access via domestic leagues,” Masters said on Thursday, referring to the Super League’s lack of inroads for teams on sporting merit.
Liverpool and Manchester United, with further financial backing from Wall Street bank JP Morgan, were reportedly pushing a Super League proposal earlier this season. More recently, Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona have been linked to Super League plans.
LLUIS GENE / AFP / Getty
Both the updated 2024-25 Champions League structure or a new Super League would likely result in more matches for competing clubs. But Masters isn’t willing to reduce the number of teams in England’s top flight to free up room for extra continental fixtures.
“I think for the foreseeable future, the Premier League is a 20-club competition,” he said.
Several other well-known football figures have spoken out against the Super League in recent months.
Andrea Agnelli, the president of Juventus and the head of the European Club Association (ECA), said in January that teams should only enter European competitions on sporting merit.
Bundesliga chief executive Christian Seifert has also questioned those pushing for a Super League. “The brutal truth is that a few of these so-called super clubs are in fact poorly managed, cash-burning machines that were not able, in a decade of incredible growth, to come close to a sustainable business model,” he said.
Jean-Michel Aulas, the president of Ligue 1’s Lyon, has described his club’s fans as “fundamentally opposed to a private European league.” He also warned that clubs “need to listen to the cultural and social demands of supporters.”
FIFA president Gianni Infantino has threatened to ban players who compete in a European Super League from competitions under the world governing body’s jurisdiction, including the World Cup.
Powered by superstar Kylian Mbappe, Paris Saint-Germain blew Barcelona away in the first leg of their last-16 tie on Tuesday, getting three goals from the young Frenchman en route to a 4-1 thumping. It was a special night for Mbappe, and another humiliating one for a Barca side that’s experienced a concerning number of harrowing outings in recent years.
Below, we look at some of the standout stats on both sides of the divide.
1: Mbappe is the first player to score a hat-trick against Barcelona in the Champions League knockout stages. Andriy Shevchenko and Faustino Asprilla are the only other players to net a treble against the Blaugrana, both doing so in the group stage during the 1997 season.
3: Tuesday’s setback signaled the second time Barcelona has lost by three or more goals at home in this season’s tournament – Juventus beat them 3-0 in December. That’s as many heavy defeats as the Blaugrana suffered in their last 20 seasons combined across all competitions at their hallowed ground.
5: Mbappe has now faced off directly with Lionel Messi on two occasions; the pair also met in the 2018 World Cup. The blistering Frenchman has five goals in those matches.
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— Paris Saint-Germain (@PSG_inside) February 16, 2021
9: Mbappe completed nine dribbles in the match, second only to Alphonso Davies’ 11 for the most in a single Champions League game this season. His other raw numbers weren’t too shabby, either: Mbappe had the most shots (6), most shots on target (4), created the most chances (4), and had the most touches inside the opposition penalty area (10). And, of course, he scored more times than anybody else. A perfect evening.
22: An important reminder that the former Monaco forward is, incredibly, still only 22 years old. Coincidentally, that’s the same age Messi was when he scored his first hat-trick in the Champions League knockout stage.
230: Mbappe has now been involved in 230 first-team goals for club and country (154 goals and 76 assists) in just 252 matches. Video game numbers.
The young Frenchman was unstoppable on Tuesday, scoring a stunning hat-trick to power Paris Saint-Germain to a dominant 4-1 victory in their Champions League last-16 encounter with Barcelona. After the one-sided contest, manager Mauricio Pochettino revealed the 22-year-old made him a guarantee the previous night.
“The best players always have absolute confidence. He was feeling calm,” Pochettino told reporters after the match, as quoted by Tom Allnutt of Agence France-Presse. “He said to me yesterday, ‘how many times have you won at Camp Nou?’ I said once with Espanyol. He told me: ‘tomorrow you’ll win a second.’ That’s why he’s a top player.”
The World Cup winner certainly backed up the talk.
Mbappe also praised Pochettino in the wake of Tuesday’s triumph, and, frighteningly, said PSG have yet to play their best under the Argentine, who only assumed his position on the touchline last month.
“The coach has done a marvellous job since he arrived but he has also carried on the work done by Thomas Tuchel who had done an extraordinary job taking us to the final (last season),” Mbappe said.
“Things have been a bit disrupted for him because he had (COVID-19), not to make excuses, but we are improving. We are not yet at our peak. Today was great but we will keep trying to make progress so that we can repeat this type of performance.”
