A couple of months ago, during a discussion with his former Manchester United team-mates Gary Neville and Roy Keane, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer rattled off a list of names he wanted at Old Trafford, only to miss out for whatever reason.
Declan Rice, now the £105 million driving force behind Arsenal’s latest Premier League title charge, was one. So too were Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham, a pair of bonafide superstars who arguably take up two-thirds of the podium when it comes to the greatest players in world football today.
Flash forward to early May, in the build up to Monday’s trip to Crystal Palace, it was the turn of Solskjaer’s Manchester United successor Erik ten Hag to wonder what might have been had the Red Devils managed to deliver two ‘outstanding’ talents.
Two who would surely have an underachieving outfit at least in the conversation for a Champions League spot – if not better – at this stage of the season.
Ten Hag opens up on Frenkie de Jong and Harry Kane
“This club can only have outstanding players because the expectations are so high. Manchester United is the biggest, or maybe second or third, biggest, club in the world, the highest fanbase so expectations will always be there. It can only be outstanding players,” the under-pressure Ten Hag tells legendary former right-back Neville on Sky Sports.
“That’s players who have all the skillset. That is, the physical and especially the mental skillset they need to perform and contribute because we have to win every game. There’s an expectation around every game from us so you can only fulfil that expectation when you have those outstanding players.”
‘Outstanding’ is certainly a fitting description of Frenkie de Jong and Harry Kane, two of the finest players in their position anywhere on the planet. De Jong, who worked with Ten Hag at Ajax before joining Barcelona for £64 million, came within a whisker of joining Man United back in 2022, before deciding to stay in Spain.
Kane, meanwhile, has been worth every penny of the initial £82 million stumped up by Bayern Munich last summer, the former Tottenham talisman scoring 43 goals in 43 games for Thomas Tuchel’s Champions League semi-finalists.
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What might have been for Manchester United?
“In this period, we couldn’t always get the players we wanted,” Ten Hag said when asked about De Jong, an elite ball-carrier who he wanted to partner with the more defensively-minded Casemiro. “But then you have to build and you have to accept that you get talent in instead of players who already proved it in the past.
“It would’ve been De Jong and Casemiro playing and complementing each other.
“We have had some choices made with talents like Rasmus Hojlund. I can see a striker (Kane) who already proved it, who we want to sign and we couldn’t get him. And then we went to Rasmus because he’s a talent.”
Hojlund, 14 goals in an impressive debut season, certainly looks the part at Old Trafford. But while he is still a work in progress, Kane is very much the finished article. Who knows? Perhaps one day Hojlund will be putting up numbers similar to that of Bayern’s number nine.
But that still feels like a fairly long way off.
“You know Harry Kane will get you 30 goals,” adds Ten Hag, who’s future is yet to be confirmed by new United decision-makers Ineos. “I think Rasmus will get there, but he needs time.
“It’s not fair to assess him the same as Harry Kane. I would never compare two players because they are very different.”