7 random Manchester United legends: What would they be worth now?
To clarify, we are valuing all players when they were aged 25 – not when they were at their peak. This is because Neymar was 25 when he joined PSG for a world record fee, and it also provides a level playing field.
Here are our 7 random Manchester United legends: What would they be worth now?
7. George Best – £200 million
We start this seven with George Best, possibly the most iconic of all Manchester United legends. One of the things that this series will show is how and when legends developed, and George Best was a player who achieved an incredible amount at a very young age. He bagged 17 goals in a single season for Manchester United – from the wing as a teenager – and by the age of 23, he’d won a First Division title, a European Cup and a Ballon d’Or. In the season before his 25th birthday, Best bagged 22 goals in 51 games in all competitions, which is a similar record to Neymar’s final season at Barcelona. We’ve valued Best very closely to Neymar’s world record move at £200 million, although it has to be said, if his career went the way it did in real life, that would be an appalling piece of business for the buying club.
6. Roy Keane – £90 million
Republic of Ireland assistant manager Roy Keane watches on during the FIFA 2018 World Cup Qualifier between Republic of Ireland and Austria at Aviva Stadium on June 11, 2017 in Dublin.
Whilst £200 million at 25 years old would be terrible business for Best, whose career was basically over at 27, £90 million would be something of a bargain for Roy Keane. The Republic of Ireland international had just won the double in his third season at Manchester United when he turned 25, and he would be named club captain by Sir Alex Ferguson the following season. During his mid-20’s, Keane was at the height of his powerful, athletic and dominant approach to midfield battles. At £90 million, we’d take Keane over Pogba all day long, but we can’t price the former Nottingham Forest man any higher since there’s little precedent for box-to-box midfielders going for even £30 million.
5. Gary Pallister – £70 million
This was a pretty tricky one. Gary Pallister became the second most expensive signing by a British club when he joined Manchester United for £2.3 million in 1989, then aged 24. That’s evidence of the high regard he was held in, and by 25, he had a further 43 top flight appearances for the Red Devils under his belt. A big, quick centre-back who could play a bit too. In the end, we decided a 25-year-old Pallister would be worth about the same as what Liverpool recently paid for Virgil van Dijk. Pallister went on to spend eight years at Manchester United, where he formed a formidable centre-back partnership with Steve Bruce and won four Premier League titles.
4. Cristiano Ronaldo – £275 million
Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid during the UEFA Champions League Semi Final Second Leg match between Real Madrid and Bayern Muenchen at the Bernabeu on May 1, 2018 in Madrid, Spain.
The most expensive player in this seven, Cristiano Ronaldo became the world’s most expensive footballer when he joined Real Madrid from Manchester United aged 24. The fee at the time was £80 million, but football finances have changed a lot in the near decade since then. At 25, Ronaldo had already won three Premier League titles, a Champions League and a Ballon d’Or. He had hit 42 goals in his best season, and 33 goals in 35 games the season before his 25th birthday, which happened to be his first at Real Madrid.
Ronaldo would actually be a decent signing for £275 million at 25, as he went on to hit 50+ goals in each of the next six seasons, and is still going strong now at 33.
3. Peter Schmeichel – £18 million
The great Dane turned 25 in 1988, and he had been playing in the second tier of Danish football as recently as 1986. He had a couple of impressive years with Brondby, even winning his first caps for the national team, but he was not widely known outside of Denmark. It wouldn’t be until the age of 28 that he joined Manchester United, and even then he only cost £505,000. The question then, may be why is the fee as high as £18 million. Well, scouting systems and networks are far more impressive now than they were in the late 80’s, and Schmeichel had already represented Denmark at a European Championships, so we’d like to think someone would have recognised that he was a quality player.
2. Dennis Viollet – £65 million
Manchester United player Dennis Viollet poses for a picture in 1959. Viollet made 259 appearances United between 1953-1962.
The oldest player in this seven, Dennis Viollet is an often overlooked Manchester United legend, and that really ought not to be the case. He is the most prolific of Manchester United’s ten all time top scorers, having scored 179 goals in 293 games. A hard working and explosive centre-forward with that uncanny knack of scoring goals, at the age of 25, Dennis Viollet was involved in the tragic Munich air disaster. That season would be the fifth consecutive campaign in which Viollet hit 20+ goals, and that kind of consistency in front of goal would carry a hefty price tag today. The English top flight is stronger today than it was in the 1950’s, and Viollet hadn’t yet been capped by England, so we think a valuation of £65 million – more than Alvaro Morata but a little less than Romelu Lukaku – would be fair. He went on to leave Manchester United at the age of 28 for Second Division Burnley, before going over to the United States.
1. Ruud van Nistelrooy – £120 million
Ruud van Nistelrooy actually signed for Manchester United during the same summer that he turned 25. The fee, £19 million, was a short-lived record fee for a British club. Van Nistelrooy was coming off the back of a season in which he had played little football due to injury, but he had scored 32 goals in 33 games the previous season, and 38 goals in 46 games in the one before that. Bearing in mind that the Eredivisie was a stronger league back then, and that van Nistelrooy was a two-time Dutch Footballer of the Year, we think he’d still command a British record transfer fee today. £120 million would make him the third most expensive footballer in the world right now, behind only Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. Ruud went on to score 150 goals in 219 games for Manchester United, before joining Real Madrid for just over £10 million.
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