Gary Neville has revealed what Steven Gerrard told him when the former Liverpool captain was asked to sign for Manchester United.
The Sky Sports pundit was speaking on the Stick to Football podcast when he dropped the bombshell that, around 20 years ago, Sir Alex Ferguson wanted to bring the midfielder from Anfield to Old Trafford, and duly got the Huyton native’s England teammate on the case.
Neville outlined: “I have just remembered when Sir Alex asked me.. when I went into his [Gerrard’s] room with England and asked him to sign for United. I felt as though it was a bit of a hopeless [case].
“What would it have been, 2004? He was close to going to Chelsea and Sir Alex rang me and said he’s anxious. I think his words were ‘Tell him I’ll fetch him and take him back down the East Lancs and bring him back’.
“I went to see Stevie and he was quite categoric quite quickly! He said ‘Seriously, I wouldn’t get out of Liverpool and my family would never get out of Liverpool’. Those were his exact words to me.”
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Liverpool fans of a certain age will remember the agony of seeing Gerrard reportedly being on the brink of signing for Chelsea just weeks after our Champions League triumph in 2005, so just imagine how much harder it would’ve been had he crossed the M62 to Old Trafford a year earlier.
Mercifully, the midfielder found it too difficult to walk out on his boyhood club, and a few years later he’d see his former Reds teammate Michael Owen destroy his legacy among many Kopites by joining United, even if it wasn’t a direct move between the two teams.
Such is the intensity of the rivalry between the northwestern powerhouses that it now seems incomprehensible for a player to transfer directly from one to the other, especially when the man in question captains one of the sides and is a local lad.
For instance, could you imagine Trent Alexander-Arnold going to Marcus Rashford on England duty and saying ‘Jurgen Klopp wants to bring you to Anfield, what do you reckon’, or vice versa?
Liverpool were lagging well behind United in the Premier League table 20 years ago, but not even that could come close to persuading Gerrard to become the first man since Phil Chisnall in 1964 to move directly between the two clubs.
We’ll be forever grateful that our captain stayed put and went on to secure his place in legend by inspiring the Reds to European glory in Istanbul a year later.
#Ep98 of The Empire of the Kop Podcast: EOTK Insider with Neil Jones🎙️