Messi at Manchester City would bring fantasy football to England

 Reuniting the Argentinian with Pep Guardiola would set the Premier League alight, and transform the way City are viewed

A fantasy? Messi reunited with Pep Guardiola, under whom at Barcelona from 2008-12 the Argentinian produced some of the most scintillating form of his glittering career? Messi, the Barça boy and man who joined the Catalan club as a quiet 13-year-old and matured into the Blaugrana’s greatest footballer and one of the best in the game’s history, leaving to sign for City to perform again for Guardiola?

The stance at the Etihad Stadium is that Messi is a supreme footballer and Guardiola continues to admire the player rated as the finest he has managed. And that, actually, it could be possible to sign him. City certainly believe they have a chance of pulling off a deal for the ages. A chance of taking Messi from his spiritual football home to a new challenge in east Manchester in what would be the signing of the Premier League era if not any era of a domestic game that dates from the late 1800s.

Messi playing in England would be seismic. The arrival of a four-time Champions League winner and six-time recipient of the Ballon d’Or would take a league supposedly impossible to hype any further into a new dimension of fevered attraction. Except Messi’s presence might just make this new hyperbole credible.

And what about for City, as a club and as a team trying to win matches and trophies? It would instantly vault them to the next level, in their on- and off-field profile. Of the latter, City’s glamour factor would hit the rarefied air occupied by the exclusive set. Suddenly the City story would include a glorious chapter of the time an immortal of the game landed to lead the Sheikh Mansour project. City would become a destination club of the ilk of Real Madrid, Barça and Bayern Munich.