Manchester City leading chase for Lionel Messi - The Warm-Up

It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? It’s only three days since Lionel Messi dropped the biggest transfer bombshell of our lifetimes by telling Barcelona he was going to leave his one and only professional club and there was nothing they could do about it, thank you very much. Except maybe there is. Except maybe Messi will get FIFA involved to force his exit through. Except maybe Josep Bartomeu will offer himself up as a blood sacrifice to appease the Sun God of football and convince Messi to stay at Barcelona after all. Yep, it’s been quite a week.

It’s hard to see the wood for the trees with the Messi saga and who knows whether Bartomeu’s reported offer to quit if Messi pledges to stay will have the desired effect. There have been suspicions right from the start that this was a political move from Messi, a coup aimed directly at the Barcelona president, and if this House of Cards-esque manoeuvre does come off, maybe it will be enough to keep him there.

But, if this is genuine and he is leaving the club, then a certain clarity is starting to emerge over his potential destination.

In the minutes and hours after the world’s most famous burofax dropped, introducing a generation of people to the word burofax, all the big clubs had a turn being linked with Messi. Juventus. Manchester United. Inter. PSG. Manchester City. And, by dint of a giddy tweet from Rio Ferdinand, Chelsea too.

But reports emerging in England on Friday morning do seem to indicate which way the wind is blowing here, with the Times and the Mail both carrying details of how Messi directly contacted Pep Guardiola in recent days. The Times says there was a conversation last week where Messi informed Guardiola he was busy typing out his burofax, while the Mail goes one step further and reports that after being humiliated by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, Messi pinged Pep to ask about the possibility of linking up with him again.

What’s clear is that Frank Lampard didn’t get a phone call. And neither did Thomas Tuchel. And with a player who likes to keep things close, his personal bond with Pep could end up being a deciding factor here. Just think, there is now genuinely a very good chance that Lionel Messi plays for Manchester City in the 2020-21 Premier League season. A prospect that should have every English football fan excited.

As Mikel Arteta said yesterday: “It’s always sad to see in my opinion the best player in football history leave that football club. Let’s see what happens, if he comes to England we’re all going to enjoy it.”

Harry Maguire had the uncomfortable experience of opening the 10 O Clock news on BBC One last night. Always a tough gig. The Manchester United captain sat down with Dan Roan to give his side of the story after being found guilty of aggravated assault, resisting arrest and attempted bribery following a night out in Mykonos. Maguire has appealed the verdict and will have a retrial.

The truth here is that it’s hard to know the truth. But Maguire certainly described a fairly harrowing experience from his perspective. And, well, if you believe that has happened to you, then it would explain a lack of apology on his part.

“I don’t feel I owe an apology to anybody. An apology is something when you have done something wrong,” Maguire told the BBC. “I regret putting the fans and club through this but I did nothing wrong.

“My initial thought was that we were being kidnapped,” he said when instead of going to hospital, the group were taken to a police station. “We got down on our knees and put our hands in the air and they just started hitting us. They were hitting my legs saying my career is over. Saying: ‘No more football. You won’t play again’.

“At this point I thought there was no chance these are police so I tried to run away. I was in that much of a panic, fear. Scared for my life. All the way through it.”

Some good news for Arsenal ahead of Saturday’s Community Shield against Liverpool, with Mikel Arteta saying yesterday that he is expecting Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to sign a new contract at the club.

With one year left on his current deal, there had been some doubt over whether Aubameyang would stay at a perennial crisis club but Arteta seems to be holding things together pretty nicely and with the FA Cup win ensuring European football for the coming season, and Arsenal reportedly readying a nice contract of around £250,000 a week, it seems their best forward since Robin van Persie, and possibly even Thierry Henry, could end up staying.

"We have had some really good talks with him and his agent and I am pretty confident we will find an agreement soon. That's my feeling," said Arteta.

It’s not a bad question…

Arsenal v Liverpool has thrown up some truly epic encounters down the years, including the most epic of all the epic encounters back in 1989. But for today’s Retro Corner, we are going to relive an evening when Andrei Arshavin somehow managed to score four goals at Anfield.

On Saturday it’s the traditional curtain-raiser for a season that will be anything but traditional. Arsenal take on Liverpool in the Community Shield at Wembley and you can follow that one with us from 3:45pm on the brand new Eurosport site.