'I couldn't stand it' - the Treble winner who quit Manchester United

Nicky Butt didn't even make the substitutes' bench for the 1999 FA Cup final.

He was told to forget it. You're not playing. So instead of soaking up the atmosphere at Wembley, Sir Alex Ferguson placed the midfield under strict instructions to look after himself, stay fresh and prepare for Bayern Munich in four days' time. Butt would be a certain starter in Barcelona for the Champions League final, with Roy Keane and Paul Scholes suspended – not that he was delighted about it.

"When the two lads were suspended, I was gutted," he would later say in an interview. "I wanted to play because I was picked, not by default, so I was gutted for my mates – my really good mates.

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"Their heads were down and I was sick for them. Being completely honest, I don’t think I would’ve played if those two had been able to, as the manager would have gone with his normal 4-4-2 that had served him so well that season. I don’t think people could have argued with that. I didn’t hold the midfield together that night."

Butt might not have been proud of the way he played in the Camp Nou late in May 1999, but the outcome came to define him and his United teammates. They were immortalised by the Treble success that came with two stoppage time strikes and Butt, 24 at the time, still had his whole career ahead of him. The turn of the millennium arrived and the early years of the noughties were mixed.

The signing of Juan Sebastian Veron from Lazio in 2001 for a whopping £28.1million – a British transfer record at the time – is often seen as the beginning of the end for