After my successful season with Karlsruhe, I was close to joining Borussia Dortmund. But I had a business manager that did some terrible work for me.
Dortmund wanted to sign me and I didn’t know that he [business manager] went and dealt with the club and asked for too much money. And they said no.
He told me a few weeks later and I was pretty upset because for me it was not about money. If I had an opportunity to go to Dortmund it would have been a dream. I had a few other clubs interested and I nearly signed for AS Monaco in France.
They had a good team, Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet were there. I had a contract in front of me but I said I’m going to wait. But after I got injured, they retracted the offer.
I had a seven-year contract with Karlsruhe and that was because they didn’t want me to go. They were scared that Bayern Munich or some other clubs would sign me. Karlsruhe had lost a lot of players to Bayern Munich over a period of ten years and they didn’t want that to happen again.
I didn’t have an agent when I signed the contract and they didn’t deal with me correctly. They pretty much forced me into signing it even though I was not ready to do so. I stayed there for three seasons and when they got relegated on the last day of the season, they couldn’t afford to keep me.
I had offers from AJ Auxerre from France, Glasgow Rangers and Borussia Moenchengladbach and I was not sure which one to take. For two or three weeks I had these offers on the table and I was not sure whether I should go to France or Scotland. It was pretty much between Scotland and France until Liverpool came knocking and I went to Liverpool.
When I arrived at Liverpool players were all friendly and I felt welcomed in that dressing room. Playing in England is something I wanted to do my whole life, I wanted to win the FA Cup. Being there was great. Roy Evans is the manager that bought me; it was no problem and I liked him a lot.
When a coach buys you, he tends to use you and then they had that joint management with Frenchman Garard Houllier and that’s when things started to go wrongwere not going right.
With two managers in charge – one sees the team play like this and another one sees team play like that and that is when things started to go wrong. And I also did get injured and that was it for me at Liverpool.
When I had to get my knee operations Gerard Hollier started cleaning out and getting rid of players that he didn’t want. And unfortunately, I was one of them. Paul Ince and few others that he didn’t want also left.
That is the sad part about football when a manager can do that if he doesn’t want you. I still had two years left on my contract and I said I’m not going to stay here and just earn money because I want to play football again and that is when I moved to Stuttgart.