Gary Neville reveals how he tried to convince Alan Shearer to join Manchester United at Euro 96 as Brighton defender is linked with return to Newcastle United

Here, we round-up all the latest Newcastle United stories:

Neville on Shearer’s NUFC move

Alan Shearer’s move to Newcastle United was one of the Premier League’s ‘most surprising’ transfers, according to Gary Neville.

Speaking on a transfer special with Jamie Carragher, Neville revealed that he tried to convince Shearer to move to Manchester United during Euro 96:

“Certainly the one that shocked me the most like ‘what’s just happened there’ was Shearer to Newcastle.

“I thought we had him that summer. I just thought that past Euro 96, there’s no way that he’s going to go to Newcastle from Blackburn.

“I just thought we had him, I had spoken to him - I think I lost the deal!” Neville joked.

“I had gone to a Bryan Adams concert with him, I had spoken to him at Euro 96 and just thought there’s no way he would turn us down.“We were flying, we had just won the double, there’s no way he was not going to come to Manchester United.

“Newcastle at the time were unbelievable, Kevin Keegan was the manager, we’d obviously just pipped them for the title the year before so it wasn’t a shock in [the sense] that he was going to a club down there, he wasn’t, he was going to a great club.

“I just thought we had him and I thought ‘oh, he’s a proper player and he’s going to make Newcastle a top team’.”

Dan Burn links

Brighton defender Dan Burn has emerged as a transfer target for Newcastle United with the former Magpies youngster reportedly ‘very keen’ on a move back to his boyhood club.

If Burn makes the move back to the north east, for a fee believed to be around £10m, then it would be redemption for the defender who has admitted that he doesn’t look back too fondly on his time at Newcastle:

“I was there from 11 to 13, but don’t remember much of my time, maybe I’ve blocked a lot of it out, because it wasn’t a particularly good experience being let go by the club you support, with the realisation setting in that you’re probably not good enough to play at that level.”

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