It was the early hours of May 20 2007. Manchester United’s players were in the upstairs bar at London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel, sitting around, drowning their sorrows after being beaten by Chelsea in the final minutes of extra time in the FA Cup final.
Jackets had been cast aside, ties were askew and the mood was flat — at least until a few of the players’ wives began to murder Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, a reminder that United, having won their first Premier League title in four years, still had plenty to celebrate. Suddenly some of the players started a defiant chant of “We’ve got our trophy back” and then Wayne Rooney, a napkin on his head, was bouncing up and down to the Manchester United Calypso. It was quite a scene.
Advertisement
One player seemed largely detached from proceedings that night. After joining United from Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2004, Gabriel Heinze had won the club’s player of the year award in his first season, lauded as a “warrior” by Sir Alex Ferguson, but a serious knee injury had taken a toll and, having lost his regular place at left-back to Patrice Evra, he was known to have become disillusioned with life at Old Trafford. His relationship with Ferguson had become strained — so much so that his selection for the FA Cup final, in preference to Evra, had come as a real surprise.
All of Heinze’s team-mates expected a parting of the ways that summer, particularly when he flew to Spain to watch Real Madrid’s victory over Deportivo La Coruna the following weekend. What nobody expected — least of all Ferguson — was for Liverpool to emerge as Heinze’s preferred destination, or for him to push so hard in pursuit of a transfer that would have rivalled Sol Campbell’s move from Tottenham Hotspur to Arsenal as the most acrimonious move of the Premier League era.
To United’s indignation, Heinze even enlisted the services of a member of Liverpool’s legal team in his determination to force a deal through. United, for their part, were every bit as determined to scupper it because, as Ferguson said behind the scenes more than once in a summer when tensions between the two rivals escalated dramatically while they were both touring the Far East, “There is no way he is joining that club.”
Ahead of Sunday’s game, the most eagerly awaited clash of the rivals in at least a decade, this is the story of one man’s attempt to take the treacherous path from Old Trafford to Anfield — and another man’s determination to stop him. It is a story that dominated the back pages for an entire summer before being resolved and swiftly forgotten. “My God, that actually happened, didn’t it?” said one of the protagonists when approached by The Athletic this week. “That was just… mad.”
Advertisement
It was. And in the game of claim and counter-claim that went all the way to a Premier League arbitration shortly before the transfer window closed in late August, there were allegations — vehemently denied — of an illegal approach and of another agent’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade Crystal Palace to offer a “stepping stone” via which Heinze might have been able to move to Liverpool indirectly. And it all came down to a debate over a letter that was dictated by a breathless United chief executive on a roadside in Catalonia.
Not since April 1964 had a footballer been transferred directly between Manchester United and Liverpool. On that occasion, the player was Phil Chisnall, a 20-year-old forward who swapped a role on the fringes of Matt Busby’s squad at United for a similar role at Anfield.
It would seem unthinkable now, but it was no big deal for Chisnall. “Back then it was just a footballer moving from one club to another,” he told the Liverpool Echo in 2007.
“I was able to go to Old Trafford and play for Liverpool and get a good reception from the crowd. The only person who was bothered was the missus. I told her I was going to play for Liverpool and it meant she had to take all the curtains down, pack up and move down the East Lancs Road. She wasn’t too pleased.”
With Chisnall, the transfer was arranged in a cordial conversation between Sir Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, two managerial rivals who remained close friends. Forty-three years later, the football industry was a very different one. Deals were no longer struck between managers as they enquired about each other’s well-being. The transfer market had become more clandestine — rarely more so than in the case of the deal that was proposed to take Heinze to Merseyside.
The surprising discovery, speaking to some of those involved at the time, is that it emerged out of a desire for transparency. On June 13, Roberto Rodriguez, Heinze’s agent, contacted David Gill, the United chief executive, to ask whether he might put in writing his willingness to sell the player so that any interested parties would know the agent was not offering him around without United’s knowledge.
Advertisement
Rodriguez caught Gill at an inopportune moment while cycling in Catalonia. Football executives are often criticised for taking holidays while the transfer window had opened, but Gill had already completed deals with Porto and Sporting Lisbon to add Brazilian midfielder Anderson and Portugal winger Nani to Ferguson’s title-winning squad. Negotiations to sign Owen Hargreaves and Carlos Tevez were well advanced. After a season like United had enjoyed, with two significant additions already secured, he was more than entitled to a holiday.
Gill took Rodriguez’s call on the roadside and stated the club’s position: that Heinze could leave, but it would take an offer in the region of €10 million. He told the agent he would send a document authorising him to speak to potential buyers. He called a secretary at Old Trafford and dictated a letter to that effect. Job done, he got back on the bike. And with that, Rodriguez went about trying to find a buyer for his player — looking not just to Spain, which the United hierarchy expected, but much closer to home. Only 30 miles away, in fact.
One source at Liverpool at the time recalls the first suggestion came via Javier Mascherano, who was away with Heinze in the Argentina squad at the Copa America in Venezuela. Another suggests it came directly from Rodriguez, asking if Rafa Benitez, who was known to be looking for a new left-back, would be interested in signing Heinze.
There was initially an air of scepticism at Anfield, an assumption that the agent was using them in order to create a false market. But it soon became clear that Heinze’s interest was genuine. And if that was the case, then Benitez and Liverpool were definitely interested too.
United had just wrestled the Premier League title back from Chelsea and looked ready to dominate once more, but Liverpool had just reached their second Champions League final in three seasons under Benitez and, with new owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr promising to splash the cash, things seemed to be looking up.
Benitez challenged the owners — publicly as well privately — to prove their ambitions matched his own. Fernando Torres was his principal target that summer, along with Yossi Benayoun, but he made clear to the board that signing Heinze was a rare opportunity to strengthen his team and hurt United in the process. As one source who was at Liverpool at the time puts it, “that part of it appealed to Rafa in a massive way.”
By early July, as Liverpool closed in on a club-record £20.2 million deal to sign Torres from Atletico Madrid, word of Benitez’s interest had reached the back pages.
United’s immediate response was dismissive. They had no interest in selling Heinze to Liverpool and, since he had two years left on his contract, it was a non-starter. Nothing to see, move on please.
Beneath their casual dismissal of Liverpool’s interest, though, Ferguson was furious not just with Rodriguez but with what he interpreted as a deliberate attempt by their rivals to undermine and destabilise United.
For his part, Heinze was out of reach, focusing on the Copa America, where Argentina were beaten 3-0 by Brazil in the final on July 15, the same day United set off for Tokyo for the first leg of their pre-season tour of Asia. Heinze would have no involvement in the tour — he was entitled to a three-week holiday before reporting to pre-season training on August 6 — but the issue dogged United on every leg of their expedition.
Advertisement
On arrival in Tokyo, Ferguson was asked about the Argentina defender and the suggestion that Liverpool were interested. “Gaby’s agent has advised us that he wants to move on,” he told a press conference. “I’m not too sure about that and we don’t have a concrete offer from any particular club.”
By the end of that day, though, they had received a formal offer from Liverpool, which cited the belief that Heinze was available for a sum of £6.8 million (€10 million). United rejected it immediately and in the strongest terms. At another press conference later that week, after United drew 2-2 with the Japanese team Urawa Red Diamonds, Ferguson was asked for an update. “I can assure you, Liverpool will not be getting Gabriel Heinze,” he growled. “We can put that to bed right now and we have done so. We have had a couple of offers for him and we have turned them down. Heinze’s agents are rolling the ball all the time. But no matter what his agent thinks, we are in the driving seat. I don’t know exactly what Gaby thinks because it’s all coming from his agent, but this has been going on for a year and a half now.”
Gill spelled out United’s position. “It was a significant offer, but we rejected it because it’s Liverpool,” he said. “We wouldn’t sell a player to Liverpool, Arsenal or Chelsea. We’ve relayed that to the agent in no uncertain terms. I couldn’t have been clearer. If the club were still a PLC it might be different, but we don’t have some of those pressures now.”
By the final week of July, United had moved on to Macau. Liverpool were just 40 miles away, across the South China Sea in Hong Kong, where they were competing with Portsmouth, Fulham and South China in the Premier League Asia Trophy. The commercial demands of a pre-season trip like that meant Ferguson and Benitez had more media engagements than either of them would have liked. The Heinze affair would not go away.
“Gabriel Heinze will not be joining Liverpool as far as I’m concerned,” Ferguson said after his team beat Shenzhen FC 6-0. “We are examining some of the statements coming from his agent and when contact was first made with Liverpool. We are not happy with the agent’s conduct in the matter and we are examining that, but it will take a couple of days before we have anything more to say.”
What was this? Was Ferguson alleging that Liverpool had made an illegal approach? Benitez, over in Hong Kong, laughed at the suggestion. “A lot of clubs, in many countries, knew what the situation was,” the Liverpool manager said. “I don’t know what the problem is. We made an offer and they rejected it. I know what they are saying to the press, but everyone in the world knows they (United) signed a document.”
At some point over the next week, with a rancorous transfer saga being played out in public in press conferences that were supposed to be about developing their respective brands in Asia, executives at Liverpool and United talked about the possibility of a cooling-off period — no more public pronouncements on the matter. But it didn’t transpire that way. Benitez and Ferguson had their own agendas and were determined to push them.
Advertisement
Benitez in Hong Kong, July 23: “He’s a player we like and he’s a very good player,” he said. “That’s the reason why they don’t want him to leave for us. All I can say is we’ve made an offer, they rejected it and now the lawyers are working.”
Ferguson in Macau, July 25: “Liverpool are opportunists, like the rest of them. The agent has obviously presented them with a situation and they’ve looked at it. If an agent came to me with a letter saying (Steven) Gerrard was available for a certain fee, I would do the same. I think the role of the agent is very, very doubtful here. David (Gill) and I have had countless meetings with these people. But they are just impossible. He’s our player, that’s the most important thing. He’s not Liverpool’s player, despite them going on like he’s their player.”
Another day, another bombshell: it emerged that Heinze and Rodriguez were planning to take the case to a Premier League arbitration hearing. Not only that, but they had enlisted the services of Hill Dickinson LLP, a Liverpool-based legal firm. And — a final insult as far as United were concerned — the solicitor Heinze and Rodriguez had instructed was Richard Green, who regularly worked with Liverpool on legal cases. United were furious.
Ferguson, July 27: “We’re aware that he’s taking legal advice, but that’s good. I just hope it’s good advice because we are very confident. I’m aware that it has been suggested that he’s using Liverpool’s solicitors, but that doesn’t worry me. He has either got a case or he hasn’t.”
Wembley Stadium, August 5. United had just beaten Chelsea on penalties to win the Community Shield. Ferguson was expressing optimism about the season ahead. Even the latest questions about Heinze could not dampen his mood. “We’ll see him tomorrow — maybe,” he said. “I hope he turns up. He’s been instructed to turn up.”
That “maybe” reflected the genuine doubt about whether Heinze would show. He had been given a three-week holiday to recover following the Copa America and Ferguson and his staff had speculated privately about whether the defender would rebel by refusing to report back to Carrington for pre-season training.
Heinze showed up, though, and he immediately demanded a meeting with Ferguson, where he spelled out his determination to leave for Liverpool. He said United had promised to sell him if they received an offer for €10 million. Liverpool had met that asking price, he wanted the move and he expected United to sanction the deal — or he would proceed to the arbitration hearing.
Advertisement
Ferguson was indignant. He insisted the Liverpool deal was simply not an option and proceeded to emphasise United’s loyalty to the player in supporting him through his rehabilitation following that knee ligament injury. He was willing to grant Heinze his wish to leave — but not to Liverpool. Not at any price. And if that wasn’t good enough for Heinze, Ferguson was prepared to leave it to the Premier League to resolve the matter.
On the morning of August 20, the gathering at Premier League headquarters in London was like a who’s who of the sports law community. On United’s side were Paul Harris QC and Edward Canty. On Heinze’s side were Richard Green, Andrew Green QC, Nick De Marco, Juan de Dios Crespo Perez, a highly prominent Spanish sports lawyer, and Rodriguez. Ferguson and Gill were there to give evidence for United. Liverpool were not represented — even if the United delegation had begun to see this as a pure Liverpool-United battle.
Few details of the confidential hearing have ever emerged, but The Athletic can reveal that things got off on a decidedly antagonistic footing when United’s legal team registered an objection to the presence of Rodriguez and De Dios Crespo Perez at the hearing. The arbitration panel — which included Sir Dave Richards, the Premier League chairman, and Peter McCormick, a solicitor who worked as an external legal adviser to the league — agreed. Rodriguez and De Dios Crespo Perez were asked to wait outside.
Heinze’s team were also unnerved by the reverence and bonhomie with which Richards and others at Premier League headquarters greeted Ferguson. The optimism that had taken them this far began to evaporate.
As the hearing began, Heinze was summoned to give evidence. He said exactly what he had told Ferguson: that he wanted to leave, he had been told he could leave for €10 million, Liverpool had met this asking price and he was eager to move to Anfield. He suggested that denying him this move would damage his career since it was clear he no longer figured in Ferguson’s plans and no other club had met United’s valuation.
Gill was asked to explain what he had called the “famous letter”. The United chief executive explained the circumstances of the call from Rodriguez and how he had dictated the message from the roadside. He said the document could in no way be interpreted as a binding agreement for Heinze to join any club offering 10 million euros, but rather than as a provisional arrangement. The fact he had referred to euros, he said, was a clear indication that he expected Rodriguez to negotiate with overseas clubs, rather than Premier League rivals.
It was put to Ferguson that his own opinion and his various public pronouncements on the matter did not override Gill’s; he was not an executive or a member of the company board. Ferguson responded by saying that it was up to him, not Gill, to decide the future of his team and his players. Under cross-examination, Ferguson was told that this is not how things work in company law. At Manchester United, he said, that was exactly how things worked.
Advertisement
One of the most extraordinary developments in the Heinze case came when Phil Alexander, the Crystal Palace chief executive, was summoned to give evidence on behalf of United. Alexander said he had been approached by an agent (not Rodriguez) offering Palace £1 million in commission if they struck a deal with United to sign Heinze and then immediately sold him to Liverpool.
As Simon Jordan, the former Palace chairman, put it in his autobiography Be Careful What You Wish For, “My stance was no way were we getting involved and I told Alexander to contact David Gill, Manchester United’s chief executive, and tell him of these attempted shenanigans, which he duly did. Of course, I took the opportunity to get Phil to advise Gill we would like them to remember the favour. The upshot was that there was an ongoing Premier League dispute between Heinze and United and we were required to give evidence and this strange and murky set of affairs was resolved by others.”
Jordan and Williams, like everyone else involved in the case, declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. Both Liverpool and Rodriguez, at the time, denied any knowledge of any attempt to use Palace or any other club in an attempt to “circumvent” United’s position. They had, after all, been clear in their attempts to go via the front door.
At the end of the two-day hearing, the Premier League announced they had dismissed Heinze’s application and ruled in favour of United. A Premier League statement said, “The hearing concluded, that the nature and intention of the disputed June 13, 2007 letter — especially when taken in the context of verbal discussions and Manchester United’s transfer policy — was unambiguous in that it envisages only an international transfer. Furthermore, the hearing finds the letter constitutes an ‘agreement to agree’ and did not create an obligation or binding agreement for the club to transfer the player to any particular club.”
Richard Green suggested that Heinze would appeal and that, if successful, they could seek to use Premier League rule M4 in order to complete a move after the transfer window had closed on August 31. “The player believes — as do his advisers — that (the letter from Gill) gives him the right to move to any club,” Green told BBC Radio 5 Live that evening. “The club were happy to sell the player. As a result, his agent went to find clubs who were keen to buy him. That is how this has arisen. It’s not because he has tried to force a sale or engineer a deal of any sort.”
Heinze said he had been fighting “for the freedom to negotiate with any club… but this anti-Liverpool clause is incredible.”
Benitez agreed, asking, “How can a player with a signed agreement be treated like this? He has a document which is clear, but the Premier League prefers to believe the word of someone else who made a mistake. I know there were accusations made against Liverpool in the hearing which were unbelievable. How can this be allowed?”
Liverpool believed Heinze was going to appeal. That was certainly his intention in the hours after the verdict. But, within 24 hours, United had agreed a deal to sell him to Real Madrid for less than the £6.8 million sum Liverpool had offered. “And that was that,” a source at Anfield says.
Well, not quite. Because in keeping with the entire saga, there was still a lot of mud-slinging to be done. Ferguson said a few days later that Heinze’s agent had been agitating for a transfer or a bigger contract since September 2005 — a meeting on the eve of that fateful Champions League match away to Villarreal where he suffered the injury. “After one year I thought it was an absolutely distressing signal to put out,” the United manager said.
Advertisement
Ferguson added that he and United had supported Heinze after the injury, allowing him to undergo his rehabilitation in Spain, only for him to jeopardise his long-term recovery by going to the 2006 World Cup without having made another appearance at club level. “We were not happy with that,” he said. “He came back unfit from the World Cup, we had to rehabilitate him again and meanwhile, all through that time, they kept having meetings with David Gill asking to leave. Or double his money. So the last few months was only a culmination of the drip-drip-drip effect you get when you deal with agents. Absolutely one thing in mind, to make money themselves, as far as I’m concerned. They wanted him to be the top-paid player in Manchester United, which is absolutely ridiculous given the quality of players as forwards.”
Heinze hit back, saying that he had “upset” Ferguson by recovering in time to represent his country at the World Cup. “From that moment on, things were different between us,” he said. “I deserved better treatment after my efforts for the club.”
A year later, Ferguson claimed in an interview with GQ that Real had only signed Heinze as a means of aiding their pursuit of Cristiano Ronaldo, who was friends with the defender. “I don’t believe they were interested in Heinze — good player though he is,” the manager said. “The end game was to get Ronaldo.”
Heinze responded by expressing disappointment that “someone with the experience of Ferguson is capable of saying such stupid things. He wanted me to go — and now he says he wanted me to stay? I was there for three years and gave everything.”
Heinze won a league title in his first season at Real, but he was among those players sold in the summer of 2009 after Florentino Perez returned to the presidency and ushered in a new galactico era with the signings of Kaka, Karim Benzema, Xabi Alonso and, yes, Ronaldo. He was sold to Marseille, where he won another league title in his first year before, intriguingly, the French club were drawn against United in the Champions League group draw the following season.
It felt like a grudge match, Heinze coming up against Ferguson again, but peace unexpectedly broke out in the build-up to the game. Ferguson described him as “a fantastic player for us, a warrior” and Heinze responded by saying the manner of his departure was one of his few regrets from his playing career, putting it down to his strong will and impulsiveness. “I’m sorry that we fell out in the final days because I still have so much respect for him,” he said of Ferguson, adding that United is “the most special club of all”, a “very human and warm place” built on “heritage, legends and trophies.”
That night it wasn’t quite so warm as he had remembered. Rather than being serenaded with cries of “Argentina, Argentina”, as had been the case during his three years as a United player, he was barracked throughout with chants of “You Scouse bastard”. The United supporters had neither forgiven nor forgotten — though it was pretty mild compared to the reception he would have had if he had ever returned to Old Trafford as a Liverpool player.
“It was strange, wasn’t it?” says the former United defender John O’Shea, looking back at the saga that saw a team-mate try everything he could to force a transfer to Liverpool. “But look, it was never going to happen, was it?”
Probably not. And it begs the question of whether or when a United player might follow Chisnall in moving from Old Trafford to Anfield — or indeed take the opposite route which was last taken in 1938 by Allenby Chilton, who was a key member of United’s first title-winning team under Busby (himself a former Liverpool player). Ramon Calliste, a former Wales Under-21 international, joined Liverpool in 2005, but that was having been released by United. It was nothing like what Heinze had in mind.
Advertisement
“Gaby was Gaby,” O’Shea says. “He was a really strong character. It’s no surprise he’s gone into management now.”
Indeed, Heinze has made an encouraging early impact as a coach — certainly in comparison to some of Ferguson’s former players who were tipped for great things in management. He led Argentinos Juniors to promotion to the Primera Division in 2017 and took Velez Sarsfield to two consecutive Copa Sudamericana qualifications before taking over last month as head coach at Atlanta United, who he will lead into the forthcoming MLS campaign. Intriguingly, his coaching style has been likened in some quarters to that of his compatriot Marcelo Bielsa, who has made such a spectacular impact at Leeds United and elsewhere.
Heinze is already at his fourth club in just over five years as a coach, having also had eight different clubs in six different countries during a highly accomplished playing career. Perhaps that speaks to something Ferguson said in his 2013 autobiography about how “these guys move around” — never settling, always pushing himself and pushing boundaries.
Compared to others who crossed Ferguson — Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy, even David Beckham — Heinze got off lightly when the manager was settling some old scores in the autobiography released shortly after his retirement. He did accuse the Argentine of having “a mercenary streak” — “I always had the sense he was scanning the horizon for his next deal” — but there was also admiration for the “ruthless” attitude that made him an “absolute winner”.
“He would kick his granny,” Ferguson said — and after so much water had passed under the bridge, that sounded like a compliment.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
