Transfers that almost happened but… didn’t | Ronaldo’s proposed move to Rangers | And Pele to Hannover?
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I find it funny your analogy for this Champions League is that it's a sinking ship. Well, am I talking about the world or am I talking about football? Either way, Atlanta are getting out.
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Now, if you love sporting nostalgia and football transfers that almost happened and didn't happen in a world when we didn't have Fabrizio Romano and David Ornstein telling us about every transfer before it even happened. Richie McCormack has decided to take a deep dive into all of it. You know what, Rich? You don't stay away for long. Nathan Murphy back in Golf Weekly this week. Was he? And here you are back in OTB Towers talking to us again.
There you go. It's delightful to be back up here at full two floors back to the Towers to be speaking to yourself about this. Well, yeah. so podcast stuff this is going to be a six part series yeah six part series so the basic synopsis of it is the series is called Sliding Doors and for those who don't get the reference it's in relation to a 90s movie that starred Gwyneth Paltrow I was going to say are Gwyneth Paltrow fans going to try to go oh my god someone's finally done a six episode deep dive into the film it only dawned on me when I finished the thing I was like people mightn't actually get what Sliding Doors means so it's this sense of missed opportunity and what might have been. And in the instances of these transfers, they kind of range across the spectrum of would have had a massive influence on the other club that could have signed this particular player that's the subject of this episode.
And there is one that would have had minor influence, but it's certainly an interesting one that happened just this past year. So it kind of takes in the breadth of the lot of them. And yeah, it's thrown up a couple more since then. possibly going to have to get around to if there's ever time for a series two.
So you're speaking to a captive audience here. I always think about these where you hear about Ronaldinho almost went out on loan at one point too. I think Dunfermline had looked for him when he was at PSG and he was a very young player. Obviously it didn't happen, but it's one of those kind of great what-ifs.
What is the concept behind the 'Sliding Doors' podcast series?
What would have happened if Ronaldinho rocked up in the Scottish Premiership?
Yeah, but the one we have that I think starts off the series is Ronaldo, 90s Ronaldo, the good Ronaldo, almost signing for Rangers. Now, I kind of put this down to, yeah, right, whatever. And there's a lot of these stories you kind of initially do. This series obviously goes to those particular potential transfers that went beyond that little, ah yeah, right, whatever. These are transfers that almost happened. So you cast your mind back to, I think it was the summer of 1997. Ronaldo has become disenfranchised with life in Barcelona after just one year because certain promises were made to him. Those promises aren't going to be met. There's going to be changes in management, etc., etc., So he gets a bit antsy in his looking around.
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 were double contracting at the time, weren't they?
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