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Lionel Messi may have been close to joining Manchester City this summer, but it is not the first time that Barcelona’s talisman has been on the verge of moving to the Premier League.
According to Sky in’s Italian Gianluca Di Marzio, the Argentine superstar was on the verge of becoming a Chelsea player in 2014.
The fee would have been a world-record transfer of £ 225 million, Messi’s buyout clause at the time, with Messi, Blues owner Roman Abramovich, and then-manager José Mourinho eager for the deal to go through. It would also have made £ 50m a season plus 70 per cent of the image rights had the measure not collapsed.
In his latest book Grand Hotel Calciomercato, a diary of the transfer market’s untold stories, Di Marzio also claims that Real Madrid tried the same ploy in 2013, but that Messi promptly fired him for his loyalty to his eternal rival Barça. .
Contact between Messi and Chelsea is reported to have first started in January 2014 when the former was in the middle of a tax fraud investigation. Frustrated with the Spanish authorities, he sought a new life in London with the appeal of playing with Mourinho.
After speaking with various intermediaries, as well as with former Barça teammate Deco, now an agent, who had also played for Chelsea, a meeting was arranged with Messi and Mourinho via a FaceTime call.
That reported match went well and Messi told his camp afterwards ‘With Mourinho, from how he has spoken to me, I can win whatever I want: he is a winner, go ahead and close the deal.’
Later that summer, Chelsea did business with Barcelona in the form of signing Cesc Fabregas. And Di Marizo reports that it was a chat with Fabregas during a July preseason session in which the movement between Messi and the Stamford Bridge team was broken.
It is claimed that after his initial work to make the move work, Deco was kicked out of the talks when Mourinho spoke directly to Messi himself. Fabregas warned Deco of the situation and the former Portuguese midfielder duly went to ‘betray’ Messi’s father and agent, Jorge.
The senior Messi himself was angry at being excluded from the negotiations with the personal terms already agreed by his son’s intermediaries.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I swear,” Messi told his father.
But it was too late and the possible delicious treatment was reduced while he listened to his father and stayed at the Camp Nou. Still, it was not so bad for Messi, as Barcelona won the treble (La Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League), as he himself scored 58 goals and 27 assists.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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