Jose Mourinho blocked Marco Verratti & Raphael Varane to Manchester United
© Bildbyrån

Ed Woodward wanted the Real Madrid and PSG duo.

However, it is Mourinho that blocked Manchester United move.

Almost a year after Jose Mourinho was sacked as Manchester United manager, we continue to unravel details of his troubled spell at the Red Devils. A new report now suggests Ed Woodward wanted to sign two top names to the club, but Mourinho blocked the move.

Manchester Evening News claims that Ed Woodward, Manchester United’s executive Vice Chairman approached Mourinho with a proposal to try and sign Real Madrid’s Raphael Varane and Paris Saint Germain’s Marco Verratti during the summer transfer window in 2018.

However, the Portuguese did not even consider Woodward’s idea as he was opinion that it was quite difficult to land either player, despite being ready to offer a collective transfer fee of £200 million for both players.

Jose Mourinho blocked Marco Verratti & Raphael Varane to Manchester United
© Bildbyrån

Instead, United signed Fred, Diogo Dalot and Lee Grant in the final transfer window with Mourinho at the helm, spending a total of £72.5m in the process.

Woodward has since stepped away from United’s recruitment strategy, and the executive vice-chairman now simply signs off deals instead. Signing Varane actually might have been possible back in 2011, when Sir Alex Ferguson was at the helm, but even the Scot was unable to get past the wily Zinedine Zidane, who got Varane to Real Madrid instead.

“I hurtled down on the train from Euston to Lille to sign the young French defender Rapahel Varane,” Ferguson wrote in his book back in 2015.

“David Gill was getting into the finer points of the contract with Lens when Zinedine Zidane got wind of this and somehow scooped him up for Real Madrid from under our noses.”

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