Former Manchester United right-back Gary Neville chased down one player to swap shirts in his long and decorated career, and he saved the honour for one of the very best.
Man Utd legend Neville was never one to offer undue respect to opponents and obvious displays of deference were not on his agenda.
The Sky Sports pundit was a top-level player in his own right and picked up the club honours to prove it, winning 16 major trophies with the Red Devils under the peerless guidance of manager Alex Ferguson.
Swapping shirts is often seen as a little soft by players like Neville and former Man Utd teammate Roy Keane, businesslike winners with little tolerance for sentiment getting in the way of the job at hand.
Neville and Keane discussed the ritual of shirt-swapping on The Overlap’s Stick To Football podcast and Keane was surprisingly relaxed about it, at least at international level.
“Yeah, basically, I’m not anti-[shirt-swapping]… Sometimes it’s good to swap,” said the former Republic of Ireland international midfielder.
“I always think you swap against the player you were up against. You know what I mean?”
You wouldn’t have caught him chasing after anyone’s shirt, though, and the same was true for Neville with one noteworthy and entirely understandable exception.
“One player I ever hunted down. One player!” admitted Neville, referring to an England match in which he appeared.
“[Paolo] Maldini. I went in after the Italy game, I went into the dressing room and said, ‘Can I swap with you?’ And he gave me his jersey.”
Paolo Maldini (Image: Getty)
If you’re going to let your guard down for one shirt in a football career, Maldini’s should be near the very top of the list.
The 56-year-old is regarded as one of the finest defenders of all time and played for AC Milan for 25 years.
Neville and Maldini played against one another just once at club level but met twice in matches between England and Italy.
Maldini came out on top every time, winning 1-0 on all three occasions.
Keane played in that Man Utd against Milan in the Champions League too, and again in another 1-0 defeat in the return leg.
But he did feature in a famous win for Ireland against Italy in New Jersey at the World Cup in 1994.
