Manchester United great Sir Alex Ferguson has lifted the lid on their attempts to sign Wesley Sneijder.

Ferguson has cleared up talk of United being interested in Sneijder, who helped Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan to a historic treble in 2009-10, and says there was never any validity to the persistent speculation.

"That's come up a lot of times but we were never interested in Sneijder," he told the UTD Podcast when asked about players who were heavily linked with a switch but never transferred.

"I don't know where that came from but you get a lot of them."

Instead, legendary English midfielder Paul Gascoigne was who Ferguson desperately wanted to become a Red Devil.

"I'm not saying he didn't have a good career but he would have had a better career with us," the 13-time Premier League winning manager explained of the "absolutely fantastic player," before explaining why he would fit in at Old Trafford.

"We had Geordies in our squad like [Bryan] Robson, [Steve] Bruce plus Bobby Charlton."