Ronaldo instead ended up leaving Sporting Lisbon for Manchester United and then later moved on to Real Madrid for a world record fee of £80million.
“I saw him (Ronaldo) in the Toulon U21 tournament and we went for him, but we had a wage scale and we weren’t paying the sort of salary he wanted,” Houllier is quoted as saying in the Daily Telegraph.
“Then Manchester United played a friendly against Sporting Lisbon and all their boys said to Sir Alex Ferguson, ‘You have to sign him’. But I agreed with not breaking the wage structure. I thought it would cause problems in our dressing room.
“I know some of the signings were not as sharp as they could have been. Maybe we would have won the title with Ronaldo, but we had Harry Kewell, who was outstanding at the time and was very hungry but got a bad injury. After that, he never had the same confidence, the same appetite.”
