Manchester City defender Eric Garcia has turned down the offer of a contract extension at the Etihad Stadium.
The highly-rated 19-year-old centre-back has been linked with a return to his boyhood club Barcelona.
The Spaniard, who joined City from the Catalan giants three years ago, has made 19 first-team appearances this season.
Manager Pep Guardiola said at a press conference: “He announced to us that he doesn’t want to extend his contract with Manchester City.
“He has one more year and after that, he doesn’t want to extend. We want it but he doesn’t want to, so I imagine he wants to play in another place.”
The emergence of Garcia, particularly since the season resumed after the Covid-19 stoppage, had been a bonus for Guardiola in a problem position.
The club did not replace former captain Vincent Kompany when he left the club last summer and Aymeric Laporte missed five months of the campaign through injury.
With Guardiola appearing to lack confidence in a John Stones-Nicolas Otamendi pairing, midfielder Fernandinho was deployed as a makeshift centre-back for most of the campaign.
The club this week signed Nathan Ake from Bournemouth for £40million but will now have to decide whether it makes sense to sell Garcia this summer or risk losing him on a free transfer next year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here