Kevin Moran reveals how Kenny Dalglish nearly got him into coaching

Dalglish was keen to get Moran on the Blackburn Rovers coaching staff in 1984 after the Dubliner's retirement from playing

Kevin Moran has revealed how Kenny Dalglish offered him a pathway into management - which he declined.

At 38, Moran announced his retirement from the game at the Republic of Ireland team’s 1994 World Cup homecoming in the Phoenix Park, though Dalglish, his club boss at Blackburn Rovers, dangled a coaching role at him.

Moran explained: “He said, ‘Kevin, there’s a coaching role here for you, if you want to be the reserve team manager, go ahead, it’s yours if you want it’.

“And it was something I did think about, but at that particular time as well, a friend of mine, Paul Stretford, who I knew over a number of years being with Blackburn as well, he was a football agent, and Jesper Olsen was a good friend of his who was a very good friend of mine as well because I played with Jesper at United.

“He wanted to get the three of us together and build up the practice that he had started, which was Proactive Sports Management, and to really kick it on and I must admit, that appealed to me very much at the time and the timing was absolutely perfect.

“You’re talking about 1994, the Premier League had started in ‘92 and the whole agency business and what Jesper and I were doing, the hospitality and events and football matches and all that, was just really taking off.

“So the timing was right for me to take advantage of that and, in all fairness, that was a very good decision.”

Moran had joined Blackburn from Sporting Gijon in 1990 though says his days at Manchester United were the best of his club career.

“I spent 10 years there so the happiest at club level was without a doubt United. And yet the break in Spain was more interesting for anything else, just for the style of play and what I learned over there.

“And then I came back and I was very fortunate that four and a half years with Blackburn Rovers was a period when Blackburn Rovers was just coming to the fore.

“The Premiership had just come in, we had just got promotion via the play-offs, we finished fourth, then second, then they went on to win it the year I’d left but, in all of that, you throw in what happened then with Ireland. That took off.

“I made my debut I think in 1980 or ‘81 and then all of a sudden we had a really good team at times but just never seemed to qualify for the major championships which we hoped to do until we got the big breakthrough in ‘88 and then that period from ‘88 until I retired in ‘94, you couldn’t get six better years to play.

“The best years you could ever have,” he told Tomas O Se in a conversation broadcast on Benetti Menswear’s Facebook page.