Report: Juventus have checked in with Lionel Messi

Because 2020 doesn’t make any kind of sense and you might as well, we were greeted with quite the transfer rumor as a lot of us got ready to start our weekends.

Juventus have checked in with want-away Barcelona superstar Lionel Messi.

That’s at least what a report from French news outlet L’EQUIPE told us on Friday night. It is in that report that Juventus are considered to be “interested” in signing Messi — which, if the language is correct, makes it sound like it’s present tense rather than the past tense. And while Messi coming to Juventus seems a lot less likely — or even possible at this point factoring in the club’s current financial constraints — than, say, seeing him reunite with Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, it’s the kind of thing that makes your mind go a little wild.

Even if there was little to no chance of it happening, Juventus had to make the call, right?

They had to.

It wouldn’t be the duty of Fabio Paratici or Pavel Nedved or Andrea Agnelli to not make at least a call to see if there is some kind of mutual interest there and if Messi wanted to join up with Cristiano Ronaldo and make some kind of superteam happen in Turin.

You make the call because just the thought of having two of the best players ever on the same roster is an absolutely insane thought to try and process.

Now, is it possible? Even the optimist inside of me — and, maybe the last Juventus season and the previous six months of life in the United States has dampened that quite a bit — just doesn’t truly see how Juventus can make this work from a simple financial standpoint without selling a lot of the club’s other top players. If Juventus don’t have a lot of money to play with during this summer transfer window — and that is something that we’ve certainly been made to believe by what Paratici has said over the last couple of months — then simply trying to accommodate Messi’s salary (which will certainly be in the Ronaldo range of €31 million net) is going to be quite the task.

Or, hell, maybe Juve can just get Adidas to pay it. Get to work on that, guys.

But, with this report, maybe we can all dream even the smallest bit of Messi being a Juventus player. It probably won’t happen this summer or ever, but maybe that 1 percent chance is still out there. Remember, a lot of us thought the Ronaldo rumors were pretty amusing at the very start of it all, too. (I mean, seriously, Tuttosport?!)