Nearly signed: The remarkable list of top players Sunderland failed to land
This week, Liverpool star Virgil van Dijk confirmed there were talks to take him to Sunderland before he hit the height of his career.
It wasn’t a huge secret, of course, and nor is it even remotely surprising given Sunderland’s long and distinguished history of somehow managing to not have nice things.
In fact, the list of genuinely brilliant world class footballers that Sunderland tried to sign in their formative years is quite remarkable. Here are a few of them that makes up the list that Van Dijk now joins.
Diego Maradona
Sunderland decided to start their odyssey of finding brilliant footballers yet specifically not signing them in quite stunning fashion.
They were the first European club to identify the talents of the then 17-year-old Diego Maradona, but the ruling military dictatorship of Argentina blocked it.
Daniel Arcucci, who was the Argentinian’s biographer told the story in the Documentary ‘Bring me the Head of Maradona,’ and there won’t be a single Sunderland fan reading it who won’t hear the word ‘typical’ in their head as they read it.
“The first offer that Maradona received was from England’s Sunderland in 1977 and Maradona wanted to go,” Arcucci said.
“He said ‘If they don’t sell me to Sunderland, I’m retiring’. At that time we didn’t have a democratic government and they declared him untransferable, one of a group of players who were untransferable.”
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Ruud van Nistelrooy
Ruud van Nistelrooy is a player who is oddly easy for forget about sometimes, but he was probably as good as any striker the Premier League has ever seen.
Before he was starring for Manchester United, though, and long before he was a Galactico at Real Madrid, he was deemed too expensive a ‘risk’ for Sunderland.
“He’s a quality player and someone we were looking to buy three seasons ago when he was still something of an unknown,” Peter Reid about Van Nistelrooy in 2000. “It was just after we started back in the First Division (Championship).
“At the time he was playing for Heerenveen and I think he was only 19. But they quoted us £5m which at the time was just far too high a price for a player we could not totally be sure would be a success.”
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
There are some players, even incredibly brilliant ones, that you could have imagined at Sunderland. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is definitely not one of them.
However, he was a player that Peter Reid tried to bring to Wearside twice before his rise to superstardom with Juventus, Milan, Barcelona and pretty much all the other of the world’s sexiest football clubs.
He was a player that Reid had identified as a replacement for the ailing and aging Niall Quinn but it never happened.
“I missed out on Zlatan Ibrahimovic a couple of times,” Peter Reid said in 2017. “He was at Malmo when my former Everton team-mate, Andy King, spotted him at La Manga but he ended up going to Ajax.
“Later on I went over to Holland and spoke to Leo Beenhakker about him but we couldn’t get it over the line.”
We ended up with Lillian Laslandes instead.
Paul Scholes
Paul Scholes was another player Reid wanted and made some serious moves for without success.
It was the 1996/97 season, the final one at Roker Park that ended in relegation from the Premier League.
Back then, Scholes was just really emerging at Man Utd and was initially being used more as a centre forward than the central midfield star he eventually became.
That season, older fans will remember the raw frustration of Reid sitting on his transfer budget whilst his very ordinary team slid towards relegation.
Reid, though, was gambling on Paul Scholes becoming available at some point during the campaign. He never did. In fact, if he’d waited another 15 years for Man Utd to decide to sell Paul Scholes, he’d still have not got him.
Kevin De Bruyne
There are plenty, probably myself included, who believe that Manchester City star Kevin De Bruyne is the best central midfielder on the planet.
That is now, though. Think back 11 years to 2011, and De Bruyne was a teenage winger playing in Belgium. The then Sunderland boss Steve Bruce, presumably excitedly seeing the opportunity to teach a talented young player how to forget how to kick a ball, was all over that.
He was reportedly battling Aston Villa for De Bruyne, but both clubs missed out on him to Chelsea, who proceeded to wasted him in a very Sunderland style fashion for a few years before sending him on his way to greatness with another club.