Alan Shearer was a centre-forward built from the position’s ideals and grown from the raw force
of British football’s DNA. By the time he departed the game
he had changed the order of Newcastle United’s immortals.
He retired with 260 Premier League goals and he remains the competition’s all-time top scorer.
His 206 goals for Newcastle also displaced Jackie Milburn from the
record books and cast Shearer in bronze outside the stadium of the team he grew up supporting.
He is one of the last of the local boys, an icon in the north-west of England,
born barely three miles from St James’ Park.
This was the summer when he came home.
1996 was an important waypoint in English football history.
The Premier League was only four years old, but already the influx of broadcasting money
had begun to improve the domestic landscape. The Taylor Report had mandated all-seater stadium in
the top-flight and, up and down the country, grounds were being developed and modernised.
Added to which, BSKYB’s investment had begun to attract a growing cast
of global stars, players from the game’s top shelf
and they lent English football a credibility it hadn’t enjoyed for most of the previous decade.
And Shearer’s rise coincided with that burgeoning status.
In fact, his excellence was one of the few constants during a period of great fluidity.
Having joined Blackburn Rovers in time for the first Premier League season,
he scored at a remarkable rate – 21 in his first year, 31 in his second, and 34 in 42 games
in his third, as Kenny Dalglish’s side outlasted Manchester United to win the title. The following
season, 1995-96, Shearer moved even closer to his goalscoring apex, with 31 goals in 35 appearances.
A goal in all but one of England’s games at the subsequent European Championships
was affirmation of Shearer’s place in the game and confirmation of why,
for the second time that decade, he found himself in Alex Ferguson’s crosshairs.
Ferguson had first tried to sign Shearer from Southampton, in January 1992,
only for the then-22 year-old to choose Blackburn, Kenny Dalglish and the project
underwritten by Steel magnate Jack Walker. By the time he wrote his first autobiography,
over seven years later, Ferguson was still smarting from the rejection,
churlishly suggesting that – really – he would have preferred Sheffield Wednesday’s David Hirst.
Good player though Hirst was, by 1996 Shearer was in a category all
of his own – even in era dominated by red-hot English centre-forwards,
Shearer was the apex predator and Manchester United’s public interest was of no surprise.
Today, modern transfer stories play out across the internet’s technicolour,
with dozens of journalists reporting immediately to a highly cynical social media.
In 1996, though, United’s pursuit of Shearer was covered more intermittently, by the backpages,
or on Ceefax, and – in the loosest sense – by ludicrously over-priced ClubCall numbers,
that teased daily exclusives on remote teletext pages.
It was the clickbait of its day and, naturally,
an environment conducive to mischief, rumour and titillating bluster.
The saga even took an unlikely detour through Leamington Spa. On July 30th, shortly after a
£12m bid had been rejected, United were booked to fly to Italy ahead of a pre-season friendly
with Inter Milan. It didn’t take long for news to leak to the media that a certain A.
Shearer also appeared on the passenger list for British Airways Flight 5060, or for a hungry media
to giddily report the clearest indication yet that United had won the transfer race.
Not so fast. Blackburn Chairman Robert Coar issued a swift denial
and, in the aftermath, an employee from Travel Management, a Leamington-based Travel Agent,
was disciplined and suspended for his opportunist prank.
Not that he was far off the mark. In the years since, then United chairman Martin Edwards
has revealed that the two parties had gone as far as to agree a contract.
"Shearer had been to Alex Ferguson's house” Edwards revealed in an interview with NBC,
(he’d) spoke(n) to him and assured him he wanted to come.
Shearer himself claims to have been 90% certain that he was joining Manchester United.
He had asked Ferguson for the No.9 shirt and that had been fine. He’d also asked about
taking penalties, but – with Eric Cantona still imperious from the spot - that had been less so.
The bigger obstacle was Jack Walker. Walker was so eager to keep Shearer
that he offered to make him player-manager at just 25. He was also determined not to sell
to Manchester United, a fellow Lancastrian club, specifically.
While the world transfer record at the time was Ronaldo’s £13.2m move between PSV and Barcelona,
and Shearer would eventually be sold for £15m, any deal with United would be subject to a heavy tax.
In his autobiography, Kevin Keegan revealed that Walker would not have
sold Shearer for anything less than £20m, an unimaginably large fee in the mid-90s,
But, while United’s pursuit of Shearer continued to dominate the news cycle,
Newcastle had been busy in the background. Keegan recalls their first meeting, before
a Bryan Adams concert in Huddersfield, to which Shearer arrived in baseball cap and dark glasses.
A first meeting became a second, this time at a Crewe farmhouse owned by England midfielder
David Platt. Keegan and a phalanx of Newcastle directors pitched their vision in the morning,
Ferguson and his United cohort in the afternoon.
“The key” remembered Keegan, “was persuading him to devote the best years of his professional life
to Newcastle”. He succeeded in doing exactly that.
Shearer phoned Ferguson to inform him of his decision, trying three times before
leaving a voicemail to explain that he was heading home. He never heard back.
The most expensive transfer in the history of the game was national, headline-leading news. When
Shearer was unveiled to the Newcastle fans, on a damp day outside St James Park, locals gathered
in their thousands, in a febrile mess in front of the ground. Local children hung out of trees
and grown men chanted his name as Shearer took to a makeshift stage with Keegan and Sir John Hall.
“I’m one of yous” he told them, in his thick Geordie accent,
before the theme from Local Hero began to play and the rain continued to fall.