The paradox of Michael Owen's prolific career is that he has been required to spend so much of it confounding his many doubters. This contradiction first surfaced back in the halcyon days of France 98. Forget "that goal" against Argentina though, Glenn Hoddle, the then England coach was strangely eager to confide to journalists that he did not think "Michael is really a natural goal-scorer".

Undeterred, the young tyro — Owen first played for his country at 17 — simply kept on scoring for Liverpool and England. Yet even as he helped Gérard Houllier bring some welcome silverware back to Anfield, the doom-mongers were highlighting the protégé's persistent hamstring problems and pointing out that he made frequent trips to Munich for treatment by the sports doctor Hans Müller-Wolfhart.

By the time Owen moved on to Real Madrid in 2004 the coruscating pace which once dazzled defences was beginning to ebb away. Indeed some were surprised that the striker passed the Spanish club's medical.

He proceeded to score 13 goals that season, yet this tally should be viewed in the context of his starting most games on the substitutes' bench. Suddenly Owen's hamstrings did not seem as significant as accusations that he was "one-dimensional". If that was overlooking an intuitive positional sense and many unrewarded runs into the box, there was no escaping the fact that this apparently reluctant gálactico was making little effort to assimilate in Spain.

Unlike his Real compatriot Jonathan Woodgate, Owen made little effort to learn the language and one cameo is especially telling. Someone who knew him well revealed that Owen used to regularly drive from his Madrid hotel to the airport in order to buy English newspapers, never realising that, had he bothered to venture a few yards into the city, he could have bought the Daily Mail et al from numerous downtown kiosks. Such a lack of imagination left him far from suited to the expat life and a return to England the following summer came as no surprise.

Yet with Liverpool's Rafael Benítez unwilling to pay Real's £16m asking fee and Owen's £100,000-plus weekly wages, he was effectively forced into a shotgun marriage with Newcastle United and their then chairman, Freddy Shepherd. It was perhaps symbolic that on the day when thousands turned up at St James' Park to cheer his signing, his wife Louise was spotted near the entrance to the tunnel in floods of tears.

Small wonder. After a bright start to his Tyneside career, her husband fractured a foot and missed several months of football. Then, in the 2006 World Cup he severed a cruciate ligament and was sidelined for virtually all of the following season.

Signed by Graeme Souness, he had barely kicked a ball under Glenn Roeder and suddenly found himself under Sam Allardyce's charge. The political turmoil at St James' was hardly the ideal backdrop to a personal renaissance but at least Roeder had introduced him to John Green, a specialist fitness and sprint coach Owen still works with and who has addressed his hamstring weaknesses. That was the good news, the bad featured a tense relationship with Allardyce — who recently claimed the No10 would be far too great "a risk" to buy for Blackburn Rovers.

As England coach and star striker, Owen and Kevin Keegan had not always exactly seen eye to eye but when Keegan succeeded Allardyce in January 2008 they duly greeted each other like long lost soul-mates.

Watching Owen in a five-a-side, Keegan concluded that, now shorn of his old pace, he would be best deployed foxing defenders by coming from a deep lying, "in the hole" position. "I think Michael will end up a midfielder," claimed Newcastle's former manager. "He can link play and retain possession."

Deployed behind a front two Owen duly blossomed as relegation was avoided — but then Keegan departed, Joe Kinnear arrived, he got injured again and, finally, Alan Shearer declared him to still be an orthodox striker. A few games later Shearer changed his mind and dropped Owen, Newcastle were relegated and the striker took legal action against a report suggesting he was poised to retire in order to concentrate on his beloved race-horses.

Not for the first time, though, Owen seems poised to enjoy the last laugh with a move to Manchester United. It will, however, be intriguing to see whether Sir Alex Ferguson sees him as a striker or midfielder.

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Mark Hughes is convinced that Samuel Eto'o and Carlos Tévez are not interested in joining Manchester City only because of the vast riches on offer.

But while the manager is prepared to be patient in the pursuit of both strikers, he has warned them that the club will not be messed around. City hope to agree a £25.5 million deal for Tévez, the former Manchester United forward, by the end of this week or early next week and are awaiting the next move of Eto'o, the three-times African Footballer of the Year being involved in a cash dispute with Barcelona that threatens to scupper a prospective £25 million transfer.

Eto'o stands to earn about £200,000 a week, including bonuses, at City - double his wages at Barcelona - but Hughes rebutted suggestions that the Cameroon forward might want to go to the club only for the money and pointed to his own move from United to Chelsea in 1995 as an example of a leading player taking on a new challenge at a smaller and less successful club.

“We're not about making moves in the transfer market just to make statements about where we are in the football world,” Hughes said. “I think people understand what we are trying to do here - build something for the future. We will do that by attracting players and maybe we give them a different challenge.

“It's not just about going to top clubs and sustaining the success those clubs have in the past. Here you get the chance to be part of something right from the beginning.

“I had the opportunity when I went to Chelsea. They had a long time without winning a trophy but I went there and was part of a Chelsea team that won a trophy [the FA Cup in 1997]. That was something I really enjoyed and it's a different challenge.

“Yes, they will be financially rewarded but we offer them something different, maybe.”

Hughes remains hopeful that deals for Tévez and Eto'o can be wrapped up soon, although he has made it clear that he will look elsewhere if the respective situations drag on.

“If we get to a point where we feel things aren't going to happen, that's the time we walk away, as we've done in the past,” he said. “We made an offer for Eto'o and now there seems to be a situation between the player and his club. That has to be resolved by the player and the club he's at.”