I said yes to Sir Alex Ferguson and Man United but changed my mind and asked to join Chelsea instead – it changed lives
When John Obi Mikel decided to ditch Manchester United in favour of Chelsea, he could not know the impact it would have.
The Nigerian midfielder was famously at the centre of a tug-of-war between United and Chelsea in 2006 – one that would cost millions.
The Red Devils claimed on their website that they had struck an agreement for Mikel days after he turned 18.
However, Chelsea also insisted that they had also reached a similar settlement but that would not stop the teenager posing with a United shirt.
The most bizarre was yet to come after he went missing days after when he was set to play for Norwegian club Lyn, sparking national media coverage in Norway that Mikel had been kidnapped.
In 2021, Mikel said: “Look, I wasn’t really kidnapped. I was just staying away from the public eye making sure no one knew where I was.
“But there was a public announcement in Norway that, if anyone saw me, they should report it to the police, so we had to go and hide.
“Obviously, [Manchester] United were trying to get hold of me. So were Lyn. There were some tough times. It was like a movie.”
Ultimately, Mikel ended up at Chelsea despite Sir Alex Ferguson accusing the Blues of acting “disgusting” throughout the saga.
“My Dad wasn’t too pleased about what happened either,” Mikel wrote in theplayerstribune in 2018.