Salah among the greatest transfer Plan Bs that actually worked out, including Manchester United icons | OneFootball

Mo Salah, much like another cog in the Jurgen Klopp machine, was not the first-choice signing at Liverpool. Some Plan Bs work out rather well.

While missing out on a priority target can be frustrating, it can sometimes represent a dodged bullet with an alternative proving to be phenomenal.

Liverpool have had a couple of notable examples down the years, as have Manchester United.

10) Jens Lehmann (instead of Sebastien Frey, Arsenal)

There is an alternate reality in which Frey has a statue dedicated to him outside Emirates Stadium. The Frenchman is depicted sprawling at the feet of Samuel Eto’o to intercept a sumptuous Ronaldinho pass and launch the thrilling Arsenal counter-attack from which Robert Pires opened the scoring in the 2006 Champions League final.

It’s an ambitious piece, granted.

A comically long-running transfer saga almost reached its merciful conclusion in 2003 when, in their search for a David Seaman replacement, Arsenal considered Frey after he had established himself as one of Serie A’s most reliable performers at Parma.

He proved too expensive, however, and the Gunners were back to square one.

Arsene Wenger, reluctant to actually recognise the existence of Graham Stack – while noting that “even Stuart Taylor accepts that maybe he is still a bit too young to lead the team for a whole season” – instead settled for a short-term solution that ended up lasting four seasons.

Lehmann joined aged 33, became an Invincible, won the FA Cup and earned the first red card in Champions League final history. Not bad for a stop-gap.

9) Heung-min Son (instead of Saido Berahino, Spurs)

It is ultimately just really fun to transpose the entire career enjoyed by the transfer Plan B onto the Plan A the club wished to sign instead.

Berahino captaining Spurs to a Europa League final victory over Manchester United in his last of 454 games is the alternate timeline Daniel Levy wanted desperately enough as to make three bids ranging between £15m and £23m for the West Brom forward.

The Baggies did not relent, even through the forward’s strike threat. Berahino returned in body but never spirit, scoring 40 times in a decade after summer 2015 across spells at eight different clubs. Son reached that goal tally for Spurs by February 2018 and went on to rack up 173 to sit fourth on their all-time scorers list.

8) Alan Shearer (instead of Roberto Baggio, Newcastle)

‘Douglas Hall had been the real instigator behind Alan’s shock signing,’ wrote Terry McDermott, former assistant to Kevin Keegan at Newcastle, of the world-record signing of Shearer in his 2017 autobiography.

In Juve’s defence, it was probably quite confusing to field interest in a player they had sold a year prior to Newcastle settling for Shearer.

7) Michael Essien (instead of Steven Gerrard, Chelsea)

“How can I leave after a night like this?” asked Steven Gerrard on the Ataturk Stadium pitch in the early hours of a May morning in 2005. It was a rhetorical question Liverpool unnecessarily sought to answer for him over the course of that summer.

Chelsea tested choppy waters with a British record £32m bid in July. The Liverpool rejection was prompt but Gerrard’s response no less so: the midfielder turned down a £100,000-a-week contract extension and declared his intention to leave for Stamford Bridge.

The following day, he signed a new deal to commit his future to Anfield, stating: “I’ve only one medal left to win at Liverpool and that’s the Premiership. Liverpool is the only place I’ve ever wanted to win it.”

Chelsea took the setback well. They had courted Essien of Lyon for months but crystallised their interest when Gerrard became unavailable.

At the former’s official unveiling, Mourinho even responded to a question about which midfielder he would have preferred by simply responding: “Maybe I could have had both.”

6) Sami Khedira (instead of Steven Gerrard, Real Madrid)

Steven Capulet and Jose Montague have been fluttering eyelashes, exchanging messages and sharing a forbidden footballing love for years. Mourinho’s “favourite enemy” has developed something of a taste for playing hard to get with his “dream” manager.

The only problem was that Real Madrid wanted Gerrard, in the midfielder’s own words, “to cause a war at Liverpool to get out” in 2010. Mourinho had reportedly identified him as a priority in his first summer at the Bernabeu but it was not to be.

‘Real Madrid are closing in on the £8.5million signing of Stuttgart midfielder Sami Khedira amid cooling interest in Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard,’ said a Daily Mail article that July, in which Gerrard was described as the Spanish club’s ‘primary target’ with an off-putting £35m valuation.

Khedira was certainly a less spectacular signing, but a La Liga title, two Copas del Rey and La Decima qualifies as an undoubted success.

5) Alisson (instead of Jan Oblak, Liverpool)

For the middle portion of his nine years at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp was spoiled.

Where once he naturally accepted alternatives if his first choice was unattainable – Sadio Mane instead of Ousmane Dembele and Mario Gotze; Andy Robertson over Ben Chilwell; Steven Caulker as a Plan B to Alex Teixeira – their best period coincided with the German rarely settling, even if it meant waiting a few extra months for Virgil van Dijk after a grovelling apology and slap on the wrists.

Yet one of Klopp’s best signings was not his initial preference, if reports are to be believed. It was claimed by the wholly unbiased Slovenian media in October 2018 that Liverpool made an ‘important offer’ for Oblak the previous summer, only for the goalkeeper to turn them down and leave the Reds with the consolation prize of Alisson.

For what it’s worth, Klopp seemed to reference a vague interest in Oblak around the time Alisson arrived for “crazy money”. It was a choice with no real wrong answer.

4) Mo Salah (instead of Julian Brandt, Liverpool)

The same cannot be said for what was quite the internal wrangle between Salah and Brandt.

Klopp favoured the latter, while the air-conditioned laptop guru nerds felt the former represented far better value for money with a much higher ceiling.

This current season is on track to be Salah’s worst at Liverpool by far with ten goals in 34 games. Brandt has only once outscored that – in the 2017/18 campaign after turning the Reds down to stay at Bayer Leverkusen in a World Cup year.

The German will be leaving Borussia Dortmund on a free transfer this summer, but is somehow not included among Salah’s best replacements.

3) Cristiano Ronaldo (instead of Ronaldinho, Manchester United)

Sir Alex Ferguson will always be grateful for the apparent divine intervention of Ronaldinho’s “people” in summer 2003. Wanting to emphatically replace David Beckham, Manchester United entered Paris Saint-Germain’s unequivocally non-silent auction for the Brazilian, with Barcelona winning the £21m ballot as, in the words of PSG president Francis Graille, United had “been too sure of themselves”.

“I really thought the manager got him,” Paul Scholes would later recall, probably on a podcast, probably with Nicky Butt, before revealing that United spent a subsequent pre-season friendly against Barca “trying to boot” Ronaldinho for the rejection.

Ronaldo proved to be a decent back-up.

2) Ronaldinho (instead of David Beckham, Barcelona)

But that transfer web was multi-layered. United and Barcelona only battled for Ronaldinho after the latter failed to sign Beckham from the former.

It was a peculiar situation, unbecoming of Premier League champions. United took the unusual step of officially announcing that a £25m deal to sell Beckham to Barca had been agreed in principle, contingent on Joan Laporta winning the upcoming Nou Camp presidential election and, well, Beckham actually negotiating personal terms, never mind agreeing them.

“David is very disappointed and surprised to learn of the club’s statement,” was the response of Beckham’s agency. “David’s advisers have no plans to meet Mr Laporta or his representatives.”

His heart was set on Madrid, not a troubled Barca side that had barely scraped into the UEFA Cup first round. But Laporta had achieved his objective in shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. He had, after all, promised Beckham, Thierry Henry or Ronaldinho as part of his successful manifesto. The Brazilian was by far the easiest to deliver, particularly behind the Beckham smokescreen.

1) Eric Cantona (instead of plenty of players, Manchester United)

Depending on which source you believe, Ferguson might have scanned past as many as four names before scrawling Cantona’s on a note for Martin Edwards in November 1992.

It is common knowledge that David Hirst was targeted, while moves for Matt Le Tissier, Brian Deane and Alan Shearer were mooted then and since.

“Dion Dublin broke his leg against Palace,” Ferguson himself said in 2013. “So we started scouring about trying to get someone in. Peter Beardsley wasn’t really playing for Everton at the time so I went to Martin Edwards’ office.

To think, the dominant team of the early Premier League era might never have established themselves as such had Dublin not broken his leg, Sheffield Wednesday just accepted a £3m offer or Leeds not .