Maradona to Newcastle and two equally unlikely ones!

Go back to our time under the management of Kevin Keegan, Tyneside was buzzing in a way seldom seen in modern times and suddenly everything seemed possible, a few stories began to circulate that we were attempting to persuade Diego Armando Maradona to ply his trade for a season at St James.

Maradona as fundamentally flawed as a person he no doubt is, was blessed with the sort of skills that come around once in a generation, but he found himself more or less without a club, occasionally turning out for Newell’s old boys in preparation for the 1994 world cup.

So even at the time it did seem possible, just bloody unlikely. Then of course he went off to the world cup, got banned for drugs and the story faded into oblivion.

That was until a few years ago, when during an interview, Maradona stated that he was about to play in England for a season after the world cup, and it fell through. Without it being implicitly stated it was us, it seemed very likely, and I might even now own a Toon top with Maradona on the back.

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, better known simply as Sócrates, was one of the most gifted technical playmakers on earth and during the mid 1980s, there was a brief flurry of rumours that he was about to play for Newcastle.

The story ran like this; unlike to the best of my knowledge any world class footballer before or since Sócrates was training to be a medical doctor, this followed of the back of degrees in politics and economics, and he was planning to do his training at Newcastle University and would turn out at the weekends for us.

Unfortunately that’s all it was, a story, and this exceptional footballer and human being was never coming.

Roberto Baggio; The most likely of the three to have actually joined. The middle of the 90s, we had just signed Shearer and Baggio was possible the best player in the world at the time. There was apparently a concerted effort by Freddie Sheppard and Douglas Hall, to get him to join, and effort that reportedly went as far as preliminary talks with the player.

However Baggio had no intention of playing outside of Italy and we were just left with a massive what if?