Pep Guardiola has rubbished reports Manchester City offered Lionel Messi a stunning €100m (£88m) signing-on fee to leave Barcelona last summer.
Messi finally put pen to paper on a new four-year deal with Barcelona last week to put questions about his long-term future at the club to bed.
Reports emerged in Spain at the start of the week suggesting City were willing to shatter their wage structure and hand Messi a €50m-a-year (£44m) salary in order to move to England but Guardiola has refuted those claims.
“Lionel Messi has signed a contract one week ago,” The Guardian quote Guardiola as saying. “This was never going to happen; Messi started his career there and he’s going to finish it there. If he wanted to leave he wouldn’t have signed the contract. It’s not true [the offer].”
City are expected to rekindle their interest in former Barcelona forward Alexis Sanchez in January, however. Guardiola’s side failed to get a £60m deal over the line at the end of the summer and will return with a cut-price deal for the Arsenal star in the New Year when he will only have six months remaining on his current contract.
As for Messi, the Argentina international has made another stunning start to the season. The Barcelona superstar has played a direct hand in 21 goals in 20 appearances across league and European competition this season, finishing as the WhoScored Man of the Match 14 times in that sequence.
