From start to finish, the whole process took 34 days. It was 15 December when Manchester City's executive chairman, Garry Cook, first made contact with Milan. "I'll come out with this straight away," he said over the phone to Adriano Galliani, the club's vice-president. "We want your best player and I'm ringing up to see how much you want for him."
Galliani listened and said he would speak to Silvio Berlusconi, the *president. Later that day, a fax came through to Cook's office. It was signed by Galliani and told him Kaka was available if City "delivered the sum of 200 million". Cook jokingly faxed back: "Is that lira?"
The important thing was that Milan were willing to do business. Cook reported the breakthrough to Sheikh Mansour, the club's owner, and Mark Hughes, the *manager. A six-man team, including three lawyers, was put together, and so began the exhaustive process of trying to conclude perhaps the most audacious transfer of all time. So where did it all go wrong and how did it reach the stage that City should get their fingers burned so badly?
Those are questions that Cook was still asking himself yesterday as he and Simon Pearce, Sheikh Mansour's personal envoy, tried to make sense of it all. It has been a chastening experience and has led to concerns about Robinho's future in Manchester, and Cook did not mince his words. "They bottled it," he says of Milan. "We weren't naive. It was just that the world we entered into was unprofessional. We engaged a lot of professional people to take care of this deal. But it was all a bit too sophisticated for Milan."
Milan have been on their own Page Ranking *offensive, of course. According to the *Italians, the decision was purely Kaka's and he chose to turn down City because he could not bear the idea of leaving San Siro. Kaka himself has said it "took only 30 seconds to make up my mind".
Cook's is a very different take. "We never met the player and we simply didn't make an offer [of personal terms] to Kaka," he said. "All of which makes it difficult for us to swallow the suggestion that he rejected Manchester City. There was nothing to reject."
What we can say for certain is that it is a lesson in the complexities of what it is like to negotiate the transfer of a *genuine superstar and the minefield of legalities, politics, agents, interpreters and egos.
City, for instance, have documents to show that, by the time the transfer window opened on 1 January, a fee had been agreed for the Brazilian. Milan had slashed their initial asking price to £91m, to be paid in five instalments. A confidentiality agreement had been signed and the vibes were so positive Hughes, had gone as far as planning a new 4–1–4–1 formation, with Kaka playing in his best position as an advanced central midfielder.
By the time Cook boarded a private jet back to Manchester after the first face-to-face talks between himself, other high-ranking City officials and the Milan hierarchy, he and his colleagues were in a celebratory mood. "They [Milan] had made it quite clear that they wanted to sell their prize possession to us," he claims.
But this was only the first part of what Cook calls "a three-stage process" and it is the second phase where it gets increasingly complicated.
First, the story was leaked. Cook blames Milan for this, although various people at the City end may have been loose-lipped, too. Either way, it meant a flood of protests in Milan and, by the time Cook's team arrived in the city on Monday to meet Galliani and Bosco Leite, Kaka's father and agent, there were thousands of fans on the streets. "After that, the pressure was building on Milan," says Cook. "There was political pressure on Milan and supporter pressure. You could feel that pressure on the senior executives. The confidentiality should never have been broken."
Even so, City remained optimistic. They had been led to believe that Kaka was keen to come and excited about their plans. City, in turn, were prepared to make him the highest paid footballer in the world. But first – and this is really the crux – they wanted to do due diligence on the player's contract and commercial income.
"You like to know what you are getting before you make your offer to the player," Cook says. "We were trying to run through a professional process to understand. Kaka has a number of sponsors and complex agreements and inside those agreements are clauses that could affect the needs of his sponsors. That part had to be agreed before we could get to offering personal terms with the player. But his representatives simply didn't want to get to the complexities and the sophistication of the second stage."
City's representatives asked Bosco if they could look at his son's financial documents and the complexities of his different sponsorship agreements. "No," they were allegedly told. "Not even Milan get to see them." Cook says: "They just didn't get where we were coming from."
Kaka, City did establish, earns £12m a year after tax with a further £7m-8m from commercial revenue. Cook was once in charge of the Michael Jordan brand at Nike, estimated he could increase Kaka's endorsements 10-fold. "But all they wanted was to talk about salary and compensation for the player. They simply couldn't answer the questions."
The talks lasted seven hours and ended with an agreement that they would meet again the following morning and then arrange a further meeting in London. Yet Cook had picked up bad vibes when he spoke to Galliani in private. "He [Galliani] said his life had changed since the story had come out," says Cook. "He had had to move offices and employ protection.
"What really set the alarm bells ringing was that he also said they had already figured out with Kaka that they would come out with a joint statement saying they were pleased to say he was staying. They clearly had a strategy in place."
Everything came to a head when Cook received a call in the departure lounge at Linate airport. The man on the line was Alberto Zilani, a translator for Kaka's father, Bosco. There was, in Pearce's words, a "sudden change in emphasis".
According to Pearce, it was put to City that they needed to let Bosco know exactly what salary Kaka would earn, and that if they did not do it immediately the deal was in jeopardy. "There was a requirement for much more speed and a much greater focus on cash," he says. "Garry's response was that's not the way we wanted to conduct the talks and we would have to terminate the discussions there."
Cook went to ring Hughes to break the bad news. Milan, meanwhile, went into overdrive. "Garry got the telephone call at 11.03pm," says Pearce. "Within eight minutes Mr Berlusconi had called the most popular live television show in Italy and said, 'I have great news for you. Kaka has rejected the offer'. Then, suddenly, Kaka is out on his balcony waving to the Milan fans. They had got everything covered."
The meeting took place at the offices of Milan's lawyers and Cook felt that City were unwelcome. "We were confined to a room with no food or drink. We were starving by the time it finished. They gave us a cup of coffee so it would be unfair to say there was nothing. But the hospitality wasn't the finest. It was interesting to see how they worked. The dynamics of it were strange, very unnerving. It wasn't a place we would want to be in."
