“Despite problems at my club, I turned down the Manchester United transfer offer because I wanted to send a message.”

To send a message to Juventus when the club was going through its worst time in history, Alessandro Del Piero said he turned down Manchester United.

Following his rise through the ranks at Padova two years before, the 49-year-old Italian football star joined the Turin giants in 1993. Before he left for Sydney in 2012, he had been with the club for a huge 19 years and had won six Serie A titles, four Supercoppa Italianas, and the prized Champions League. In a club record 705 games, he scored 290 goals.

But things weren’t always good for the Italian team. Del Piero was part of the team that was sent to Serie B for the 2006–07 season because they were involved in the infamous Calciopoli scandal. In short, Juventus and other clubs were accused of choosing biased referees for certain games to give them an advantage in the game.

As a punishment, Juventus was sent to the second level of Italian football and lost nine points to begin the season. While stars like Patrick Viera, Lilian Thuram, and Fabio Cannavaro decided to leave the club to try something new, Del Piero recently told the Shoot For Love YouTube channel that he wanted to face the challenge head-on, even though United was interested in him.

“I stayed with some of my teammates—[Gianluigi] Buffon, [Pavel] Nedved, and [Mauro] Camoranesi—and we said, ‘We’re up for the challenge,'” he said. It was a big one at the time. When asked if he had ever thought about joining Manchester United, there were rumors that Sir Alex Ferguson wanted to bring him to Old Trafford. The Italian icon said, “Of course there was a time.”

“There was a hard time, even though I played for Juventus for 19 years.” In the end, though, I always chose to stay.” If you asked Del Piero why he stayed with his club, he said, “There were different reasons.” Before I played for Juve, I was a fan of the team. I joined very early and broke records to become captain.

“What we faced in 2006, I was also a captain, so I wanted to send a message to everybody, and straight away I said ‘I’m going to stay’.” In the 2006–07 season, Juventus finished first in Serie B, which got them promoted back to Serie A right away. They did this by winning 28 games, drawing 10, and losing only 4.

In all of its long history, Juventus has only played in Serie B once, in the 2006–07 season. However, the disaster had effects when they returned to the Italian top flight. That’s because they didn’t win another Serie A title until the 2011–12 season, which was Del Piero’s last game with the team he grew up with.

After moving to Sydney FC in 2012, the star scorer scored 24 goals in 48 games before moving to Odisha FC in 2014. It took Del Piero ten games to score a goal for the team before he quit for good.