This is because Galileo did not properly name the planet when he saw it. He has already observed Neptune in the past. He just created a dot to signify where it is. This was not something that people paid attention to. The only time that people started thinking about it was when they realized that Uranus sometimes gets off its orbit.
They have predicted that there is another planet that is after it. They used mathematical computations in order to know exactly where the next planet can be reached. They were able to predict it correctly with different people claiming that they discovered it.