In one of the unexpected transfers of the summer of 2012, Champions League winner Julio Cesar left Inter Milan to join Queens Park Rangers.
The Brazilian, who had the dream of playing in the Premier League, was part of an ambitious project at QPR which could not last very long.
Now it turns out that in that same summer, Julio Cesar was actually expecting to join Manchester City, following a call he received from manager Roberto Mancini. That’s a story he told to Rica Perrone (via ESPN Brasil).
“Roberto Mancini was at Manchester City at the time, and in that time, because I knew that Inter no longer wanted to rely on my work, they had already signed Handanovic. And Inter: ‘If you don’t reduce your salary, we won’t want you here anymore’. And I wasn’t going to touch a penny. I worked and earned what Inter offered,” said Julio Cesar.
“And then there was that fight, to train separately, but there was the World Cup. And I was going to miss the Cup. I went out knocking on the door. But I earned a lot, I was a goalkeeper, without a passport, I was a foreigner, so everything was adverse for me. It was coming at the end of August, then Mancini called me.
“I knew he didn’t like Joe Hart very much, so he wanted a goalkeeper. Then I answered, we started talking in Italian. I was just waiting for [the invitation], then he: ‘Julio, I want to know about Ranocchia’. I was in that stage, desperate looking for a club, then I said ‘Gee, mister’. He said: ‘I knew you were going to think that’.
“Then the chance came for Queens Park Rangers, I accepted this project, I wanted to play in the Premier League. I ended up going there, but we were very bad at the beginning of the season, they changed the coach, then I got in all over my head and ended up in Canada.”
Julio Cesar joined QPR in the summer of 2012, having left Inter Milan for free. He found a squad of big names such as José Bosingwa, Ji Sung Park, Shaun Wright Philips and Djibril Cisse.
Following a disappointing spell, the goalkeeper left London first on a loan deal to Toronto FC in February 2014, staying in Canada until the end of the season, and sealed his permanent exit to Benfica in that summer.
