Manchester City's Aymeric Laporte reflects on his time at the club, Guardiola's exit, and European 'injustices' in an exclusive interview. Laporte knows life was good at the club. 'Nostalgic,' he says, when asked 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 see me play.'