14 December 2023 , 02:00
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Gary Neville believes it was a "travesty" that Sir Alex Ferguson sold Jaap Stam after just three years at Manchester United.
Ex-Netherlands international Stam was recognised as one of the best defenders in world football when Ferguson chose to sell him to Lazio for around £15.3million. Stam joined United from PSV in 1998 and was part of the United side which won the treble in the following year, winning the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League.
However, after 127 appearances and many impressive performances, the 51-year-old was let go in 2001 after Ferguson reacted angrily when Stam's Head To Head autobiography was published. Ferguson later admitted that he made a mistake of selling the centre-back, who went on to finish his career at AC Milan and Ajax.
Speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, Neville, who played with Stam at Old Trafford, has opened up on the latter's exit from the club. Neville said: "Sir Alex Ferguson has since admitted it was a mistake [letting go of Jaap Stam]. When it happened, it was a massive shock. It's a travesty really that [Jaap] only played for Manchester United for three years.
"The quality of centre-back [Jaap] was – one of the best centre-backs that's ever played in the Premier League, let alone at Manchester United."
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Opening up on his side of the story, Stam said: "It wasn’t good, of course, [when Sir Alex Ferguson] let me go. They used [my book] more or less as an excuse to sell me, because the book wasn’t an autobiography. It was more inside information in how we worked together as a team, as a unit, in a dressing room."
Jaap Stam was superb during his three-year spell at Manchester United (Getty Images)He added: "I told him, ‘I don’t know if I want to leave, if I want to go to Italy as well – to Lazio’. At first, he didn’t want to say what club it was, then he said it – but the relationship is gone [in that moment], isn’t it? The feeling is not there anymore, it’s cracked. I spoke to my wife about it, I had just signed a new deal also with [Man] United just a couple of months before.
"We played Blackburn after that. He phoned me in the morning. He said, ‘I'm not going to take you in the squad because of the book, because a lot of the attention will go out to you because of that’. I said, ‘but if you don't take me within the squad, then there's even more attention’, and then the deal was done within days. It needed to be done within 24 hours otherwise I couldn’t play Champions League football anymore.
"Because of how I am, I wanted to play, but they needed to have that money as well for the budget. At that time, they mentioned it [the budget]."
Gary Neville and Jaap Stam was speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, brought to you by [Linked]