🤔❓ What If ... Sergio Agüero never scored THAT goal against QPR | OneFootball

“Manchester City are still alive here … Balotelli … Agüerooo … oh no! He’s lashed it into the side netting! What a chance wasted by Sergio Agüero!”

Sergio Agüero’s last gasp winner against Queens Park Rangers on the final day of the 2011/12 season is rightly remembered as one of the most dramatic and iconic moments the game has ever produced.

But what’s fascinating is how the butterfly effect of that one goal altered the course of football history in a multitude of invisible ways.

Here’s what might have happened if Agüero had missed instead …

Pep Guardiola goes to Manchester United

If Manchester City had only drawn that game against QPR, Manchester United would of course have won the title in 2012.

It’s well known that Sir Alex Ferguson was already thinking about retiring that year but the Scot instead decided to stick around for one more season and avenge the pain of that final day at the Stadium of Light.

Had United won the 2012 title, there’s every chance Sir Alex would have opted to bow out on a high, and it would have been the perfect time to lure Pep Guardiola to Old Trafford.

Guardiola left Barcelona at the end of the 2011/12 season and though the stresses and the strains of his time at Camp Nou saw him spend the following year on sabbatical in New York, he may well have found the lure of Old Trafford too tempting to resist.

After all, the 2014 book Pep Confidential revealed that the Catalan coach had previously expressed a desire to work at Old Trafford.

“The day after beating Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, Guardiola and [Manel] Estiarte travelled to Manchester to watch their next opponent in action,” reads Martí Perarnau’s book.

“It was May 4, 2011, and the pair sat together in the stands of Old Trafford watching Sir Alex Ferguson’s team beat Schalke 4-1. Once again Pep had turned to his friend and said: ‘I like this atmosphere. I could see myself coaching here one day.'”

So if United had approached Pep in the summer of 2012, it seems likely he would have accepted their once-in-a-lifetime job offer.

And though it might have taken him some time to adjust to English football, he would undoubtedly have been a success in the long-run.

The disastrous David Moyes season would never have happened, and United would surely have won more than one Premier League title in the last eight years.

At the time, United had a number of young British players with great potential on their books, and it would have been interesting to see how the likes of Tom Cleverley, Ravel Morrison, Nick Powell and even Phil Jones might have developed under Guardiola.

Paul Pogba may never have left for Juventus and maybe, just maybe, Guardiola would also have convinced Lionel Messi to join him in Manchester.

Bayern Munich hire Jürgen Klopp

If Guardiola had gone to United, Bayern Munich would have been forced to look elsewhere when appointing their replacement for the retiring Jupp Heynckes in the summer of 2013.

The obvious candidate would have been the coach they had just faced in the 2013 Champions League final – Borussia Dortmund’s Jürgen Klopp.

Klopp already had two Bundesliga titles under his belt at that time and would have been a perfect, if controversial, appointment for Bayern.

But it’s not as if nobody has ever moved between Dortmund and Bayern before, and various reports over the last few years have suggested that Klopp really fancies a crack at the biggest club job in Germany one day.

If he had gone to Bayern in 2012, it’s highly unlikely he would have been on the market when Liverpool sacked Brendan Rodgers in 2015.

The Reds would therefore have either had to stick with Rodgers or hire a lesser manager, and their wait for silverware would likely have gone on a lot longer.

While Klopp may well have delivered something for Bayern that Guardiola never could – the Champions League.

Manchester City never truly recover

There are two ways to look at that dramatic final day of the 2012 Premier League season.

On the one hand, it was a footballing fairytale as Manchester City ended their 44-year title drought by coming from behind to snatch triumph from the jaws of disaster with the last kick of the season.

On the other, City should really have beaten struggling QPR with minimal fuss that day and by scoring that 94th minute winner, they were fortunate to avoid one of the most embarrassing slip-ups of all-time.

City would have been an international laughing stock if they’d messed that up and it would have taken them years to get over the shame.

Roberto Mancini would certainly have been sacked as a result. You only have to look at that clip of him barking expletives on the touchline when Jamie Mackie put QPR 2-1 up to see that his relationship with his players was at breaking point and it was probably only the buzz of that title triumph that kept the Italian in a job for one more season.

Who knows who City would have hired to replace him?

They may have made a play for Guardiola too, but it’s well known that the main reason he took the City job in 2016 was a desire to work with his former Barcelona colleagues Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain.

But Soriano and Begiristain wouldn’t join City until the October of 2012 and given a choice between City and United that summer, Guardiola would surely have plumped for the latter.

They may have gone for Málaga’s Manuel Pellegrini, as they did the following year anyway, but in a title tussle between Pellegrini’s City and Guardiola’s United, there would surely only have been one winner.

The stench of failure would have clung to City for a long time afterwards and as well as having trouble attracting the players required to mount another title challenge, some of the players they already had may have been forced to assess their options.

Perhaps the likes of Agüero, David Silva, Yaya Touré and even Vincent Kompany may have all begun to wonder whether their chances of success were greater elsewhere.

It’s not extreme to suggest that the entire Abu Dhabi project may have begun to crumble had City not won that game, and it’s possible they’d still be waiting to win their first Premier League title now.

As rival fans have often fantasised, Sheikh Mansour may well have “got bored” and taken his money elsewhere were it not for that romantic afternoon in May 2012.

That Agüero goal was so much more than just a goal, it was an event horizon for football and when it hit the back of the net, everything changed in ways we can only really begin to imagine.