The first day was memorable. Juan Sebastian Veron was joining a club that had won the Premier League three times in a row. It was a team that, two years earlier, had won the Champions League (“football, bloody hell” and all that). Veron’s signing had smashed the British transfer record and his new team-mates were out on the field when his car swung into Manchester United’s training ground.



“One of the biggest first impressions I ever got from a player was Juan Sebastian Veron,” Mike Phelan, the first-team coach, recalls. “He turned up at Carrington when we were doing a training session. He walked across and the training session stopped. All the players were like, ‘Wow, it’s Veron!’ — Scholes, Giggs, Keane, the lot. They all shook his hand. He made such an impact.”



The good times can often be forgotten when it comes to the story of La Brujita, the Little Witch, and what went wrong for him in...