Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has revealed the biggest regret from his time as Manchester United manager after missing out on a signing which could have changed football history.
United supported Solskjaer during his time in charge between 2018 and 2021 but didn't quite have the correct transfer strategy.
As a result, they missed out on some world-class players who slipped through their grasp and went on to major success elsewhere, according to the former super-sub and first team boss.
Speaking to United teammate Gary Neville on The Overlap's Stick To Football Podcast, brought to you by Sky Bet, Solskjaer revealed that two of Europe's elite talents should have been snapped up and he regrets the missed opportunities.
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Solskjaer's biggest regret from his time in the Old Trafford hot-seat is that the club didn't failed to sign Real Madrid and England midfielder Jude Bellingham when the chance was staring United in the face.
"He was in the building," said Solskjaer. "I was there, Sir Alex Ferguson was there, Bryan Robson and Eric Cantona were all there that day.
"We all spoke to him and sold it as well as we could. He knew what he wanted a certain amount of minutes in the first team. He was 17 at the time, and he was the most mature 17-year-old I’ve ever met – he had it all planned out."
Bellingham moved from Birmingham City to Borussia Dortmund before switching to Real Madrid in 2023. He won La Liga and the Champions League in an exceptional first season in the Spanish capital and finished the subsequent summer as a European Championship runner-up for the second time with England.
If United missing out on Bellingham is a regret, not pursuing Solskjaer's former Molde teenager Erling Haaland, now an indisputably world-class striker for rivals Manchester City, was a travesty.
"I had him in Molde, for two seasons," Solskjaer told Stick To Football.
"The summer before I joined United, I rang the club and said ‘You’ve got to sign this boy – he’ll be top class’. They said no – they had enough reports on players.
"Then I became the caretaker manager [at United] and [Molde] had sold Haaland to RB Salzburg. I told the club straight away to buy him while he has a release clause. We knew that then, and no one else would’ve paid the money - £20 million, it would’ve been a bargain."
Dortmund took the chance again, eventually selling Haaland to Manchester City in 2022.
Solskjaer returned to management last month, taking over as the head coach at Besiktas after the departure of Giovanni van Bronckhorst.
Topics: Erling Haaland, Gary Neville, Jude Bellingham, Manchester United, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Transfers
Chris Nee