While everyone is starting to come to terms with the possibility of Lionel Messi leaving Barcelona, it’s still hard to see how anyone will convince Barca to let him go.
There were some suggestions that he had a break clause that would allow him to go for free, but The Telegraph have indicated that he’ll probably struggle to make that happen, so someone is going to need to make Barca an offer they can’t refuse.
Man City were always going to be linked because of their financial backing and the presence of Pep Guardiola, so this report from RMC Sport is an interesting one:
They tend to be fairly reputable in France and they’ve suggested that City are prepared to offer €100m as a transfer fee, plus Bernardo Silva, Gabriel Jesus and Eric Garcia.
It seems the default position from Barcelona is that they do not want to let Messi go, but that offer could be appealing if they have to let him go.
Replacing Messi can’t be done by one person – it needs to be a team effort – while if one player arrived in exchange then they will forever be remembered as the player who replaced Messi and it wouldn’t be fair on them.
That offer would give Barca a lot of money to allow Ronald Koeman to add to his squad, while Eric Garcia looks like he could be a good option to replace Gerard Pique in the long term.
If Messi goes then it’s likely that Luis Suarez will follow, so Bernardo Silva and Jesus would at least offer top quality replacements for this positions.
Messi will go down as one of the greatest of all time so you can’t really put a price on him, but if he’s adamant that he wants to go then this looks like a reasonable offer from Barca’s point of view.