Former Man Utd CEO reveals why Ronaldinho transfer failed | football

United were in the running to sign the Brazilian from Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2003 before Barcelona completed a £21m deal.

During his time at Barça, Ronaldinho won the Ballon d’Or and helped the club win two league titles and the Champions League.

Speaking at Rio Ferdinand Presents, Kenyon revealed that Sir Alex Ferguson was at the center of negotiations, but United eventually pulled out of the competition due to questions about Ronaldinho’s “environment”.

“What actually happened is we chased him hard, we looked at him hard,” Kenyon said.

When asked if United had agreed a fee with PSG for Ronaldinho, but later played down that figure, Kenyon replied: “Absolutely wrong. Let’s kill the myth. Maybe a rumour, but not true.

‘Look, this was the same as any other transfer, Alex would be involved, the critical decisions… the flight? Why does he want it? where would i play Who would you replace? So Alex was involved throughout the process.

“Normally, in these cases, you are dealing with the player and his agent. Here we are dealing with the player, his various agents and about twenty other people in the room.

‘Yes, he is a great player, yes, he could play, but suddenly we are in something completely different.

“Really our first Brazilian, injecting that kind of culture around training, you know, usually not on time, which is a massive thing, the Brazilian health culture is different.

“Fantastic players but there were a lot of other things that started to come into it and it clearly came with a lot of people.

“It (United) is an institution, nobody has been treated differently to the rest.”

Ferdinand added: “We’ve signed a lot of spells in that period of time and a lot of players came to the Premier League with their own physio, and it’s like at our club that never happened, you couldn’t do that.”

Kenyon replied: “Right, this started to be a bigger issue than money. We got a deal with the club, we could have got a deal with the player, but it was all starting to come to a head.

“We came back and said, ‘Look, on balance, we don’t think this (works).’

“David (Beckham) had just moved in and part of it was around the environment, not just playing.”