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Love
it or hate it, deadline day is enthralling because transfers matter.
The stories of clubs the world over have been shaped by fateful,
occasionally fantastic, deals, be they big-money additions or bargain
buys.
But although the pursuit of players can be satisfying, it occasionally
leaves supporters lamenting what might have been. After all, as
FIFA.com discovered,
there are plenty of star footballers whose careers could have taken
very different turns, and no shortage of clubs bemoaning the fact they
did not.
Hopes dashed by wages and weight
A prime example is Sheffield United, where - 36 years on - fans
still talk about one that got away. That is hardly a surprise when the
one in question is
Diego Maradona,
spotted as a 17-year-old by the then Blades manager Harry Haslam during
a 1978 scouting mission to South America. So impressed was Haslam that
he immediately set about agreeing a £350,000 fee with Argentinos
Juniors, only for the United board to decide that spending £160,000 on
Alex Sabella represented better value. Hallam’s side went on to
relegated from
England’s second tier.
Boca
Juniors ended up being the next stop on Maradona’s remarkable football
journey, but he could easily have ended up at their bitter rivals. River
Plate were on the verge of securing his signature when club president
Rafael Aragon Cabrera refused to bow to the youngster's demands for a
contract that would have exceeded those of Millonarios stars
Daniel Passarella and Ubaldo Matildo Fillol. “I had the dream of playing
for River,” said Maradona at the time, “but Cabrera has destroyed that
dream.”
Missing out on Maradona would be a
source of regret for any club but, in Sheffield at least, there is
plenty of remorse to go around. Ask fans of Sheffield Wednesday, for
whom
Eric Cantona seemed set to sign following his ban in
France
for throwing the ball at a referee. Manager Trevor Francis, though,
asked the Frenchman to stay on for a second week’s trial before making
up his mind, and Cantona refused, signing for Leeds United instead.
Football is littered with such misjudgements.
Zinedine Zidane should, for example, have ended up playing in
England at the same time as his mercurial countryman. But while
Kenny Dalglish, then manager of Blackburn Rovers, agreed a deal in principle to sign the then 23-year-old
Zizou,
chairman Jack Walker refused to sanction the move. “Why would we want
to sign Zidane when we have Tim Sherwood?” was Walker’s explanation, as
reported by the
Lancashire Telegraph.
It seems that is the fate of every all-time French great to endure one such episode in their career.
Michel Platini was certainly not immune, being declared “unfit to play football at the highest level” at 16 by a medical report at Metz.
The
Metz president of the time also recalled the club’s coaches remarking
that Platini “had a fat ass”, and a similar opinion put paid to
Paul Gascoigne’s hopes
of winning a move to Ipswich Town in 1983. Concerns about the
midfielder’s weight led to the Tractor Boys rejecting him, a decision
all the more galling in hindsight as it came just three years after they
had turned down a young Dutchman – lacking in discipline, they felt -
by the name of
Ruud Gullit.
Opportunities spurned
One player misjudged by several clubs was
Andriy Shevchenko. The
Ukraine
legend spent a week on trial at West Ham United in 1994, was offered to
Cologne the following year, and two years later was again put on a
plate for Werder Bremen. All turned up their noses, with then Hammers
manager Harry Redknapp remarking: “He didn’t look anything special at
all.”
Later the same decade, Turkish club
Gaziantepspor made a near-identical error, baulking at Sao Paulo’s £1.5
million asking price for a young
Kaka.
Within three years, AC Milan would be multiplying that figure by six.
And if Gaziantepspor were left to rue their parsimony, imagine how
Flamengo must have felt. They, after all, lost out on
Ronaldo by refusing to fund the bus fair – around 20p – from the striker’s home in Ribero.
Fulham
also have a hard luck story regarding a Brazilian FIFA World Cup
winner. In 1978, with the club in the second tier of English football,
Paulo Cesar was convinced to join, only for the deal to collapse over a dispute over the player's phone-calls home to
Brazil. Across London, Arsenal have also endured their share of costly near-misses in recent years.
Yaya Toure spent
a week on trial in 2005 but problems with his passport meant a deal was
not pursued; their second such glaring error in a matter of years. “I
had
[Cristiano] Ronaldo at
the training ground,” Arsene Wenger revealed some time later. “I showed
him around and I gave him a shirt. But in the end it was a question of
the transfer fee between the two clubs.”
Ultimately,
Arsenal refused to pay a fee of around £4 million, and by this point
they were making a habit of passing up future greats. After all, in
2000, they had
Zlatan Ibrahimovic within
their grasp and, once again, allowed him to slip away. As Ibrahimovic
recalled: “Arsene gave me the famous red and white jersey - the No 9
shirt with Ibrahimovic on it. Then I waited for him to convince me that I
should join Arsenal. But he didn't even try. It was more: ‘I want to
see how good you are, what kind of player you are. Have a trial.’ I
couldn't believe it. I was like: ‘No way. Zlatan doesn't do auditions.’
So I said no and signed for Ajax instead.”
Just as a Gunners team with Ibrahimovic,
Ronaldo and Toure would have taken some stopping, imagine an 1860 Munich side in which the talents of
Franz Beckenbauer and
Gerd Muller
were fused. This could have become reality, with Muller having been on
the verge of a move before Bayern – alerted to their city rivals’
interest – moved in to snatch the striker away an hour before TSV’s
proposed signing talks. Beckenbauer, meanwhile, had his heart set on a
move to
Die Löwen only for one of their players to slap him in
the face during a match for SC 1906 Munich. That act of violence set him
against the club of his dreams and on a course towards Bayern, where he
would go on to make history with ‘Der Bomber’.
If those two deals helped define an era, so too did the transfer of
Alfredo di Stefano to Real Madrid. After all,
Los Merengues’ great rivals, Barcelona, thought they had signed
La Saeta Rubia,
and lengthy negotiations resulting in an agreement that the player be
shared on a yearly basis with Real for a period of four seasons. Later
though, an interim Barcelona board would allow Di Stefano to join Real
for a compensation payment of 5.5 million pesetas - small recompense for
the misery he would inflict on the Catalans over the years that would
follow.
A similar fate befell Monaco, who agreed a pre-contract deal with
Jean-Pierre Papin in
1986 only for Marseille to dazzle the striker with a subsequent offer.
Compensation was paid between the south coast clubs, but for
OM it was a paltry price to pay for a player who would become one of their all-time greats, finishing as
France’s top scorer for five successive seasons between 1988 and 1992.
Unlikely destinations
Though it is difficult now, given Papin’s heroics at the
Velodrome, to picture him in a Monaco jersey, some transfers that nearly
took place are positively unthinkable. Who, for example, could imagine
Ronaldinho playing
for unfashionable Scottish outfit St Mirren in advance of his move to
Paris Saint-Germain? That, though, was a very real possibility, with the
Paisley side intended to offer the Brazilian experience of European
football before a passport scandal put paid to the deal.
A few miles away, Dumbarton came within a whisker of an even bigger coup. The great
Johan Cruyff, still just 33, might have been seen as an impossible target for a mid-table team in
Scotland’s
second tier. But manager Sean Fallon, previously assistant to Jock
Stein during Celtic’s glory years, almost convinced the Dutch master to
swap Barcelona for Boghead, only for the Scottish weather to prove
decisive. “Was I tempted? Yes, of course,” Cruyff said in Fallon’s
biography. “Playing in
England,
or Britain, was something I had always wanted to do. But when you're
old your muscles get stiff, and moving to a cold country like
Scotland would have been asking for problems.”
It may be an unusual reason for this most audacious of transfers falling through, but others have been just as peculiar. Former
Scotland international
Darren Jackson,
for instance, spent just eight days on trial at Dalian Wanda before
returning home, citing his inability to stomach Chinese food. Another
Scot,
Kenny Dalglish,
might have ended up at Liverpool as a 15-year-old, but turned down an
extra week’s trial because it would have prevented him attending a
midweek Old Firm derby. The future Anfield legend travelled back to
Glasgow to cheer on Rangers, the team he followed religiously, and yet
within months the youngster been convinced by Fallon to sign for the
Ibrox club’s great rivals.
Liverpool also missed out on
England international
Frank Worthington,
but for very different reasons. Bill Shankly had agreed a fee of
£150,000 with Huddersfield only for the striker, well known for his
off-field antics, to fail a medical due to high blood pressure. The
reason? “Excessive sexual activity.” And while Shankly told Worthington
to take a relaxing holiday in Majorca and re-attempt the medical on his
return, more of the same behaviour on that sunshine break ensured the
second test was even worse. The deal duly collapsed.
Transfers,
as we can well see, can be a fraught business. And while there will be
plenty of deals going through over the coming hours, deadline day is
also sure to end with a few clubs – and a few players – rueing a golden
opportunity missed.
Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty ImagesThanks to Thiago's wonder goal, Bayern keep rolling in.
