While Ralf Rangnick is expected to be Manchester United’s interim manager until the end of the season, there was a brief period where the Red Devils tried to bring Mauricio Pochettino in immediately.
The Argentine is still the favourite to take the job long-term at the end of the season once the German’s short stint comes to an end, but there was a slither of a door opened for the Old Trafford side last week.
That’s come from Téléfoot in France, who, when covering the pre-game news for the Ligue 1 leaders’ clash against AS Saint-Etienne, revealed, via their journalist Julien Maynard, that PSG had been prepared to let him go on ‘two conditions’.
The first was that they receive ‘a bid of somewhere in between €15-20m’, but ‘despite the interest from Manchester United, this offer never arrived’, and ‘finding his replacement’, which is when they push the idea that talks took place with Zinédine Zidane’ but they ‘never went further’.
It seems the two are linked, meaning that had the Red Devils put forward the money for the compensation, then Paris Saint-Germain might have tried a bit harder to bring in the former Real Madrid manager, but since they were never presented with the money, they decided to hold off for the time being.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens come the end of the season, as changing managers then makes far more sense than doing so now, with all parties likely to be more approachable with a whole preseason to work with rather than being asked to fix problems immediately midway through a campaign.
