During an interview with ESPN, the AFA president revealed that Pep Guardiola rejected coaching Lionel Messi back in 2018.
There were once rumors of the Argentina National Team making an offer to Pep Guardiola to coach the squad and Leo Messi. We all know that the Manchester City manager has a dream of someday coaching Messi again. This was maybe his biggest chance to do it, but these were only rumors until today.
During that era, Argentina was managed by Jorge Sampaoli and they played a disastrous tournament in which they got eliminated by France. It was one of Argentina’s most competitive generations of players who reached the previous final in Brazil. But they also lost against Germany.
Claudio Tapia, who is AFA’s president right now, started looking for the new head coach. In his many options, there was Pep Guardiola’s name as one of the few foreign managers who was considered for the job. Despite the backlash for not being from the country, ‘Chiqui’ Tapia still approached Pep to ask him if the job was appealing to him.
Pep will always honor his contracts.
As it turns out, the rumors were all true. AFA did approach Pep Guardiola to offer him a job but the Catalan manager rejected them on the spot. At the time, Pep was going through his best period as the Manchester City manager and he had no time to think about anything else.
Tapia confirmed that AFA approached Pep’s brother, Pere. However, the Catalan manager told them that he would honor his contract at Manchester City. The attempt ended right then and there but the story was still left to tell in public. Tapia finally revealed what happened during an interview on ESPN.
“From the first moment we reached his brother (Pere Guardiola), who is his manager. First, you expect an answer if you call him. Second, we had to know how much we would have to spend and how the logistics would work. We would’ve done it exactly as we did with Sampaoli. But his brother simply told us he was under a contract and that was that.”
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