"We want to win the Champions League again and that’s where Ronaldinho came into the equation. I felt if we’d got him we’d have had a big chance in Europe," Ferguson said. "Without him we can’t really do anything different (in style of play) to be honest with you. I think he’ll be a great player.
"In my experience it is the ones who have really wanted to come to Manchester United who have done well — look at Ruud. It’s when players start prevaricating that we walk away. We stretched it too far for Ronaldinho. We waited too long. The problem was the boy was in Brazil, you see, so we kept waiting for him to come back.
"The Confederations Cup didn’t help because he was playing until the end of June, then he went to Brazil. It went on and on. It was just too long, you know. We never even got the chance to sit down properly with the boy. You never got to know whether he wanted to come or not. We could never establish that.
"The frustration we had was with his brother (Roberto Assis, Ronaldinho’s agent). I did meet the player and he was fine, he was cheery enough, but he doesn’t speak English and most of the dialogue was through his brother and an interpreter. In the end we gave Paris St-Germain a deadline and then withdrew. So Ronaldinho was left with Barcelona. He rejected us only in the sense that he didn’t come out and say, ‘I want to join Man U’.
"We didn’t get Gazza. He chose to sign for Tottenham. But Paul Ince came and did a great job for us. We made an inquiry about Stan Collymore but got no farther so instead we bought Andy Cole. When we missed out on Shearer, we got Eric Cantona. And who’s to say what would have happened if Shearer had come instead of Eric? "In terms of bringing charisma to the club, Eric had an impact that Shearer could never have matched. Yet, in the long term, Shearer could have won us the European Cup. I think he was the missing ingredient for us in Europe, different to the players we had at the time. Shearer was a fantastic player. But Cantona was unbelievable for us."