Manchester United won seven out of nine Premier League titles between 1993 and 2001 – despite missing out on signing both Zinedine Zidane and Alan Shearer during that period.
Sir Alex Ferguson brought together a stellar squad that dominated English football, but even the Red Devils didn’t land all of their targets.
Manchester United famously tried to sign Shearer from Blackburn Rovers in the summer of 1996, only to be pipped by the striker’s boyhood club Newcastle United, who sealed a world record £15m deal.
There have been suggestions over the years that Shearer himself rejected a move to Old Trafford to join Newcastle, although long-serving former Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards told the latest issue of FourFourTwo that he didn’t think that was necessarily the case.
Instead, he thinks Blackburn owner Jack Walker was reluctant to sell to what he perceived as a rival – Rovers had beaten Manchester United to the Premier League title in 1995, although finished seventh a year later, and ended up getting relegated in 1999.
“We’d agreed terms with Shearer, but I don’t think it was necessarily him not wanting to play for us,” Edwards said, in a special issue of FFT dedicated to Ferguson's career and his reign at Old Trafford.
“Jack Walker wouldn’t allow him to come to us – he said he wasn’t going to sell him unless he joined Newcastle.”
Zidane was also on the market around the same time, when he joined Juventus from Bordeaux – Edwards explained that Manchester United could have signed the Frenchman.
“In France, we had an opportunity to get Zinedine Zidane, who would have been an amazing buy for us,” he said. “But I think Alex felt that if he brought Zidane in, it would annoy Eric Cantona.”
To Ferguson’s surprise, Cantona hung up his boots a year later, aged 30. Twelve months after that, Zidane won the World Cup and the Ballon d’Or.
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