The year is 2020 and Barcelona have turned a Manchester City player's head without having the funds to secure a transfer for him.
Pep Guardiola had been purring over the combination of Eric Garcia and Aymeric Laporte at the heart of his defence the previous season, but the Catalan club came calling for a player who had caused such upset by swapping La Masia for Manchester a few years earlier. Garcia had grown up under Guardiola but - like the manager himself - his heart still lay at the Camp Nou.
City's hierarchy understood that better than most, and as well as allowing unhappy players to leave they have been more willing than most to accommodate this when Barcelona are involved. Plans to move John Stones on that summer were shelved in the expectation that Garcia would go.
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However, that relied on Barcelona making an acceptable bid for a player recognised as one of the best among his generation in Spain. Despite concessions over the price from City, the Catalans still weren't prepared to stump up anything near like a respectable offer.
What clinched City's decision to break off negotiations with Barcelona and tell Garcia he would see out the final year of his contract was the pandemic. Nobody knew how the 2020/21 season would be affected by the world health crisis, yet the Blues anticipated that they may need more bodies in the squad than Guardiola would usually allow.
So the decision was made for Garcia to stay. Ultimately, he barely played as Ruben Dias arrived and played almost every game while Stones rediscovered his form, but the Spanish defender proved a useful guarantee in the City squad when they were stretched before leaving for free the following summer.
The game has created its own unprecedented situation this season with a winter World Cup, meaning the majority of City's squad will head off to Qatar for six weeks in November before the Premier League returns a week after the final. Nobody knows how it will affect the players, but it wouldn't take a genius to consider that the extra workload could lead to more fatigue and injuries.
As they did with Garcia, City may need to take this into account with their summer business. Having let Oleksandr Zinchenko leave, their attempts to sign a left-back replacement have stalled because they won't meet Brighton's asking price.
City have of course walked away from deals before in the past - some more successfully than others - but there have also been occasions where they have felt it necessary to stump up what the other side want. Given the extraordinary nature of the World Cup in the middle of this season, this looks to be one of those occasions where it is worth dropping the hardball tactics in order to avoid making things unnecessarily difficult for the rest of the squad.
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