Richie McCormack

Now his agents are casting around Europe and at the time the big money was still being spent in Italy.

So obviously a lot of the big Italian teams, and if you go back through old episodes of Gazetta on YouTube, which I'm prone to do, you'll find about half a dozen Serie A sides of the time that were interested in signing Ronaldo.

The one that jumped out at me, and it's one that he revealed afterwards,

And again, I was like, yeah, right, whatever.

But I went and did a bit of digging, went into the newspaper archives and all of this.

And there was a very real element of truth to Rangers' interest in signing Ronaldo in the summer of 1997.

Now, if you look at the modern day Rangers, you kind of think, there's no way they could financially compete.

They had an obscene amount of talent within their squad.

So I think that summer, the likes of Jörg Alberts came on board, but they'd already signed, obviously, Paul Gascoigne, Brian Laudrup.

They had a really, really good squad.

Unfortunately, they couldn't get it done in Europe, which is why the Ronaldo story came to the fore, and which is why Dave Murray, who was the chairman at the time, had the phenomenal idea of potentially signing Ronaldo, offering him...

the moon, the stars and everything that is above Glasgow and saying that he wouldn't even have to play in the Scottish Premiership of a Saturday.

Just for European games.

They would be maintaining Ronaldo purely for European games and this is 100% verifiable that this was something that had been proposed.

Ronaldo's agents at the time...

say, yeah, Rangers came to us, they had a really sizeable financial bid.

In the end, there were only really three clubs, I think, that were in the race formally to sign him at the end of the day.

Inter, obviously, is where he ended up.

Lazio were another name at the plate.

And the third team that was right there, unbelievably, yet actually believable, is Rangers.