Man City accidentally bid 70 million pounds for Lionel Messi in 2008, reveals Former CEO

Former Manchester City CEO Garry Cook in an exclusive interview with The Athletic revealed that he in the year 2008 accidentally bid 70 million pounds for then-upcoming Barcelona star Lionel Messi which was just a couple of weeks late to be accepted.

Cook was the CEO of the Manchester-based club between 2008 and 2011 after the club were taken over by the Abu Dhabi United Group, and was in charge of overseeing transfers.

With the takeover imminent, City were desperately trying to sign a marquee name for their manager Mark Hughes.

Brazilian Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Dimitar Berbatov, and Fernando Torres were all prime targets before Robinho’s 32.5 million pounds deal broke the British transfer record.

Cook admitted to making a monumental bid for then 21-year old Lionel Messi after mishearing club chiefs over a conference call.

Then-owner Thaksin Shinawatra’s deputy Pairoj Piempongsant had been speaking to Cook and COO Paul Aldridge when the comedy of errors occurred.

‘Pairoj Piempongsant was getting heated,’ Cook told the Athletic. ‘The phone was on the table and he was speaking to Paul Aldridge, who had previously been with West Ham, got himself in a bit of trouble [over the Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano saga], and was also part of Thaksin’s world.

‘So picture the scene. There’s Paul with his London accent: “Pairoj, you got to tell me what we’re doing, it’s getting out of control”.

‘Pairoj was lying on a chaise lounge, getting a massage, and shouting: ‘Yes, yes, yes! Very messy, messy, it’s getting messy” Something got lost in translation and — on my daughter’s eyesight, this is the truth — that was misheard as “we’ve got to get Messi”.

The miscommunication led Cook to make a gigantic bid for the now six-time Ballon d’Or winner for which the La Liga club were forced to check whether it was genuine.

Cook said: “Paul came to me afterwards: ‘Garry, this is getting confusing, I don’t know what we are doing here.’

“I said: ‘Put the offer in, let’s see what we come up with’.

“Then Dave Richards called me the next day from the Premier League: ‘Garry, have you put in an offer for Lionel Messi? Seventy million pounds? Are you mad?”

“He said he’d had a call from Barcelona and they wanted to know if it was real.

They were saying to Dave that, if it was real, they might have done a deal a few weeks earlier.”

Messi ended up staying with Barcelona where he has gone on to become arguably the best player in the history of the game.