Aymeric Laporte interview: Falling out of favour with Guardiola and why European ‘injustices’ still hurt

Aymeric Laporte knows life was good at Manchester City.

“Nostalgic,” he says, when asked by The Athletic how he looks back on his five years at the club. “So much, so much. So much, so much.

“When I see the players going to other teams and being with other people and they have not had that same success, I feel bad. I feel like, ‘Ah… we should’ve been together until the end, no?’ We deserved that.

“Maybe we would’ve been all together at City and we would have lost every single Premier League, I don’t know. But the feeling of nostalgia, yeah…”

Laporte sits in the back room of a restaurant just down the street from the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, where he is playing once again with his boyhood club, Athletic. Still just 32, he left City three years ago, and will play for Spain at the World Cup this summer.

There is, at times, a matter-of-factness about the defender. Unlike many City players whose exits were anticipated, allowing them a send-off in front of supporters, he was transferred to Al Nassr in the middle of summer 2023, a couple of months after City won the treble. Life moved on.

“I did not even say goodbye,” he laments, but when asked how that makes him feel, he is blunt. “Life is like this,” he says. “What do you want to do? Nothing.”

Why Saudi Arabia? In short, City were asking for a fee that few clubs were willing to pay. Al Nassr came up with an offer of €27.5million (£23.5m; $31.6m) and it was accepted.

Otherwise, he articulates his affection for City with genuine warmth, even tenderness. He talks glowingly about his former team-mates, the chairman and support staff who helped deliver unprecedented success and some of English football’s most memorable moments.

He also rails against refereeing decisions he believes stopped City from winning five Champions League titles, and says he is still bothered by gut-wrenching defeats against Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid.

His City story is rich and nuanced, and it begins with him rejecting the club after months of talks, just as they were about to trigger his Athletic release clause. It was 10 years ago, as Pep Guardiola prepared for his first season in the Premier League.

“I was deciding between clubs in Spain, and in England there were a few teams also, and I decided on City because I knew Pep wanted me,” he explains.

“When he was at Bayern Munich still he talked to me to say, ‘Come, you will be my player with John Stones’, and stuff, and I said, ‘Let’s go, this is my style, this is what I want’.

“I was ready to sign but I decided to wait a bit because I broke my ankle with the national team, the French national team, a few days before.

“I didn’t want to go to a new team to rest, to feel that when I arrived I was in doubt. I knew I needed time to recover and to play, and playing here is different than at City. At City there will be top players. You can train, but you don’t play, so it’s not the same.”

It sounds like an extremely mature, sensible decision now, but that is only with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that City returned for him 18 months later, in the 2018 January transfer window.

“It was crazy,” he admits. “Right now, thinking about it, I’m crazy, but I always had that mindset of trying to do the best possible. My financial advisor, my right hand since the beginning, said to me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said I don’t want to be injured when I arrive there, it would be bad, and after one or two years, they will want to sell me, maybe. I preferred to come back stronger, and many teams would want me if I come back stronger.”

There were no guarantees it would be City. Far from it.

“It was difficult for them to accept,” he says. “After that we didn’t have one conversation. They didn’t tell me nothing about nothing. We tried to get back (in contact) and nothing.

“After one and a half years, they needed a centre-back. One was injured, John maybe, maybe Vinny (Kompany) too. I pushed to be called. That time I said the opportunity will not escape me, I will go for sure, even for free.

“I mean, it’s not about money, it is not about anything else. It’s time. It’s time to go.”

Laporte signed his City contract on the Tuesday and played on the Wednesday, thrown straight in for a 3-0 victory against West Bromwich Albion. The team were already flying, a mile clear at the top of the Premier League thanks to a blistering start to the season that contained a run of 18 consecutive victories, a league record.

“I have this style of play, so it wasn’t that difficult for me,” he says. “And the players made it very easy. When you have Leroy Sane, who runs 36 or 37 kilometres per hour, it’s crazy, you just throw the ball and he will go there. You have Kompany kicking everyone and everyone is scared of him, it is unbelievable.

“You have David Silva, who turns with six people around, he can do whatever he wants, easy. You have Kevin De Bruyne, who passes the ball, every pass is a goal, fantastic. ‘Kun’ (Sergio Aguero), every shot is a goal. It’s like this.”

That season ended up being perhaps the greatest individual one in English football history, as City finished with 32 victories, 106 goals, 50 points at home, 50 points away, 100 in total. They had the title sewn up well before the end of April, yet they knew they could break the 100-point barrier and pushed hard for it.

Heading into stoppage time on the final day at Southampton, the game goalless, they were falling short by two points.

“I felt so bad when it was 0-0,” he says. “We were so under pressure by the management, Pep, Mikel (Arteta, the former assistant coach), everyone there wanted to reach 100 points. And the last game of the season, Gabriel Jesus scored but we were maybe in the 90th minute or something, so it was like a loss, like we were losing the Premier League.

“Unbelievable. I never thought about this before, 100 points — 97, 98 is OK, but it’s not the same. Did you see the celebration? It was like we won the Premier League in that moment, not the 100 points. We were far ahead of second place, maybe 15 points clear, no? And we were celebrating like crazy.”

Over the next few years, City embarked on one of the most relentless trophy hauls in football history. After their 100-point season, they won the domestic treble, plus the Community Shield — the ‘fourmidables’, as they were dubbed by the club’s content department — four Carabao Cups in a row, four titles in a row and the club’s first Champions League, as part of a famous treble.

For all the glorious nights Laporte shared with his team-mates, there were some bruising defeats. In 2019, they thought they had scored a stunning late goal in a frantic Champions League quarter-final with Tottenham, Raheem Sterling slamming home what would have been the fifth goal of a 5-3 win on the night, only for the VAR, in the system’s debut season, to intervene.

Three years later, City seemed to have put an end to their European misery and were heading to an accomplished 1-0 victory at the Bernabeu, only for Real Madrid’s Rodrygo to strike twice in stoppage time. The game went to extra time, but City were out on their feet and were eliminated by a Karim Benzema penalty.

“The emotions were terrible,” Laporte says. “Against Madrid it was a s**t sensation, so lucky. And against Tottenham it was the worst in my life. These two games…”

Laporte’s memories may resonate with many City fans; during that Tottenham game, the VAR failed to spot one of Spurs’ goals going in via Fernando Llorente’s arm, which later contributed to a rule change that disallowed goals that involved the use of an arm in the build-up, something that soon went against City.

“Against Tottenham, we lost because of the hand of Llorente,” Laporte recalls. “And the year after, the first game of the season is against them. I flicked to Gabriel Jesus, it hit my head and my hand, and the VAR said handball. Who can say this one is handball and last year we lost the Champions League because of this? They are killing me. So many injustices.

“I swear, every year, we were in the same situation. We missed the penalty against Tottenham, Aguero, and after they scored with the hand. Against Liverpool, offsides, no offside. Small details. We could have won the same as in the Premier League, five in a row… in six years we could have won five Champions Leagues. Stupid mistakes. I don’t know… I am losing my mind, you know? It’s always, ‘Arrghhh’.”

Those games still pop into his head now and again. “It’s trauma, no? These kinds of games. Uff.”

Laporte was part of the squad when City finally got over the line in Europe, beating Inter 1-0 in the 2023 final, a victory that also sealed their historic treble. He, though, played a much less integral role than he would have liked, starting just 11 league games, including two after the title was won, and only featured in one of City’s seven Champions League knockout games, a 24-minute substitute appearance.

“The year where we won four titles was fantastic, ‘fourmidables’, it was unbelievable,” he says. “Unbelievable. It was the season. If I have to choose between the treble and fourmidables, for me, even with the Champions League, it’s the fourmidables.”

Laporte and his best friend in the squad, Riyad Mahrez, both left after that treble success, frustrated with a lack of playing opportunities in the biggest matches of the season. For Laporte, the beginning of the end proved to be his heroic role in City’s title victory the previous year.

“I knew that in that moment, I was f***ed because I couldn’t even run, and we had two games left and no centre-back available,” he says of the run-in during the 2021-22 season.

For the final game against Aston Villa, Stones was rushed back to play right-back, with a struggling Fernandinho at centre-back alongside Laporte.

“We were losing 2-0 against Villa,” he says. “The second goal they scored, I couldn’t turn myself to take the ball, I was in the right line but I couldn’t move. My leg was stiff, I couldn’t even flex my own leg, I couldn’t really walk. And then we won the game and it was one of the craziest games I’ve ever seen. I was very happy but after I had to go for surgery and I never came back as a main player.”

The surgery on his knee kept him out of the opening weeks of the 2022-23 season, and with other injuries in the defence, Guardiola requested the club sign a new centre-back late in the transfer window. City identified Manuel Akanji, who would go on to play a crucial role in that treble campaign, but the extra numbers meant Laporte never got back in.

“You are not the man you were, because since the beginning of my time at City I was the main one, I was one of the references of the team, and after I had a few injuries I started feeling different in the team because I missed many games,” he says.

“I was downgraded in the team and with the manager so maybe he felt it, and he started playing others, signing other players. The last year, there were maybe five or six centre-backs. I don’t remember exactly, but we had so many centre-backs to play two positions, it was very difficult to accept the challenge.

“You see, for example, Liverpool. There are not five, six central defenders. They trust the player they have and that’s all. And it’s what I was missing at City. One year there are two centre-backs and next year there are six. I understand there is a challenge, but also too many is too much.

“The rotation and everything, I wanted to go to the national team and if you don’t play, you don’t go to the national team, you have to keep the rhythm. So many things happened in my head that I wanted to change, because I’ve always been competitive and I never wanted to sit on the bench. I was still young, I had a lot of potential to play games.”

After two years in Saudi Arabia, Laporte returned to Athletic last summer, and he is expected to start for Spain during the World Cup this summer.

“I’m excited, let’s see what we can do,” he says. “As a team, we have very, very good players. If you look at the players, we are all playing for big teams… Arsenal, City, Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Leverkusen, top teams.”

Laporte could yet have the high point of his career ahead of him if Spain win the World Cup, even if he has enough City memories to last a lifetime.