Blame Mitten. I had Law, Hughes and Cole in my 25 but he already filled up over half the slots.
End of discussion. The list stands.
25 Greatest Manchester United players
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Blame Mitten. I had Law, Hughes and Cole in my 25 but he already filled up over half the slots.
End of discussion. The list stands.
Number 10. Cristiano Ronaldo
New
Ronaldo at 10.
How old are you and all the guys you quoted here?
Because you would all have to have been born in the 1940s and 1950s to have actually watched Denis Law in his prime for United.
Not to mention, you would also all have to be local Manchester lads, since very few games were televised.
And why are you guys calling him Dennis?
His name is Denis.
Surely you'd get his name right if you grew up watching him and all confidently can correctly place him in on a list of our best ever players.
Of course Law is a legend.
But how can you all possibly be 70-90 years old who watched him play countless times, and know exactly how good he was compared to the rest of the players?
Don't have an issue with rio missing out, we were never known as a defensive team (I know we had that ridiculous run with vidic, Rio and vds), but we were much better known for attacking football. And we have vidic who won premier league player of the year twice anyway.
The big ones for me are ole and ruud, I'd have cole and Yorke over them personally. I think if yorke was Brazilian his 27 goals and 18 assists the year we won the treble would have won him the balon dor that season. Never really look back fondly on ruud which I know puts me at odds with a lot of this forum. Was at uni so didn't go to ot that much during that period and I didn't like the way he left.
The big ones for me are ole and ruud, I'd have cole and Yorke over them personally. I think if yorke was Brazilian his 27 goals and 18 assists the year we won the treble would have won him the balon dor that season. Never really look back fondly on ruud which I know puts me at odds with a lot of this forum. Was at uni so didn't go to ot that much during that period and I didn't like the way he left.
So Pele wasn't very good either then?
Did I say that?
But unless you actually watched Pele in lots of matches, you can't possibly place him in the correct spot on a list of all-time greats.
That's like watching only YouTube clips of Harry Kane before judging his ability.
As I said before, this list is about our ranking our best players. Not our most legendary players. If you want to actually rank how good someone is, you need to have watched many matches of them in their prime.
Unless you are really old, you simply have no way of knowing exactly how good Denis Law was compared to the other players on the list.
The only thing we can confidently speak to is his legendary status. But this isn't a list of most legendary status.
Just to illustrate the point:
Are there any 150 year olds on here that would like to argue that Billy Meredith was even better than Law?
So an all time list then is entirely pointless.
It's "Manchester United's Greatest Players". I think you can make some judgement on the greatness of a player without having watched all their games. Having a statue outside should give some indication of how great he was considered. There are lots of highlights of him available. His record is great, he won the big trophies with us.
I think legendary status definitely comes into greatness. That's why I don't mind Solskjaer's inclusion in this list.
Again, you are not distinguishing between legends and best players.
Making a list of legends isn't that hard.
You can take into account word of mouth and status instead of actual raw skill-based data like video because it's a legend.
Making a list of all time best players, however.
In a way, yes. It's pointless. Because any player who had their prime before the modern age when almost all matches were televised, will only have a very small amount of people alive today who actually watched them play enough to properly rank them.
You could however easily make a list of the best modern players. Because all the evidence is right there for anyone to see.
Because of the amount of videos around of him playing, just like with Best or Charlton, and listening to the eyewitnesses at the time.
With Edward it’s more difficult because there isn’t a lot of quality video footage of him, but there are plenty of eyewitnesses who claim he was even better than Pele. Charlton himself said that Edwards was the only player that ever intimidated him because he was that good, the best player Charlton ever played with or against Charlton claimed.
But it's all subjective isn't it? Lee Sharpe is a United Legend to me but he's not in the 25 greatest players which is the title of this thread. You are thebone who brought legend into it.
Sure.
The term "greatest" is vague, and does allow for taking into account legendary status.
But again, how are you properly and confidently placing a player you surely almost never watched outside of a few clips and a few full recorded matches on a list?
You surely do get the point that this is going to be quite arbitrary.
There is no way you can give the same thorough assertion on a player like Law, than for example you could on Wayne Rooney. It's just impossible.
Not entirely, no.
By your own admission you are being objective by distinguishing between Sharpe's legend status and actual ability. He was a really good player. But we can all agree there are better players on that list.
Interestingly in fergusons book Leading, he said the players he coached that he rates the highest are Ronaldo, Cantona, Scholes and giggs.
And better players not on it.
I know. And that's great.
But would you judge players today on the same metrics? You wouldn't, because you know that eyewitness testimony can be romanticized. And in some cases, heavily so.
Watching and assessing a player for yourself will always be better than just going by legendary tales and word of mouth.
Absolutely.
And yeah, Edwards is impossible for anyone alive today to properly judge. Unless you are close to a 100 years old and either worked for the club, or went to our games on a regular basis. And even then, you'd have to be of sound mind at such an old age to even be reliable.
Not to mention Billy Meredith. He is our first ever "superstar" or legendary player, if you will.
There is simply no way of putting him and Ronaldo side by side to properly compare them.
There is a complete lack of hard evidence to do so. Even the soft evidence on Meredith is questionable. Match reports from that time aren't very descriptive or analytical.
Ronaldo is tenth. So United had, according to Mitten, nine better players.
Longevity factored into that
Isn't it obvious that this list is not about best players?
The list is clearly not based on skill alone.
You could kill much of football and sports discussion though if you had this attitude to comparing players, even now, how can you properly compare players of different positions, is Hakimi better than Bruno Fernandes? Or players across leagues, is Sesko better than Oyarzabal? Even across relatively close eras, people bringing up Ronaldo's (Brazil) lack of goals in the Champions League when only one or two teams made the competition in his peak and he scored in a much stronger Uefa Cup, compared to say Mbappé who plays almost every match every season.
People enjoy speculating and judging who they think is the best based on various factors - contemporary reports, achievements, clips of great moments etc. There aren't any right answers, which is why the discussions tend to go on a loop forever.
I know and I agree with you 100%
I just think it's odd when someone speaks on such feigned authority on players they surely almost never watched.
It's kind of bizarre to be so outspoken and certain Law is better than Rooney etc. or vice versa.
Unless you're 80 years old, had a season ticket in the '60s, and are of unusually sound mind today, you can't possibly know. And that's okay. Just don't pretend that you do, and deride others for having the nerve to not pretend to rank Law or any old legend as high as you think they should be.
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Understand what you mean to an extent but just for an example that is quite alien to people a bit younger than me (I'm not that old), I grew up watching Man United videos (the old VHS) that used to show the history of the club and they used to show a lot of clips of Best, Law, Charlton to the point that I was more familiar with those players than I was with Premier League players from the 1990s. I think if you watched Messi play 5 matches and the rest clips and added that to reports from the time and his achievements, awards and trophies, you could give a decent judgment that he was the best players of the past 20 years, you don't need to watch 700 games of 90 minutes to pick that up, the magic of Messi would be illustrated fairly quickly.
Got a feeling Scholes might be next but personally I'm hoping he climbs as high as possible. Probably my favourite United player.
I disagree, but not entirely.
I get your point of not having to watch 700 games.
But highlight reels can be made from almost any players, proven on YouTube everyday.
If you want to distill any players best moments into a few minutes, you can make a pretty average player look world class.
The thing that makes Messi great isn't just a short highlight reel. It's mostly the fact that he kept that level consistently world class for many years. Many players can have world class moments or even a world class season. Very few can sustain it over several seasons.
So I don't think you need to watch 700 matches.
But I absolutely think you need to have watched a few seasons of a player before actually understanding their level.
Just like we do now.
We don't make our final judgement on Santos after 10 games, or even 30 games.
We give him roughly one or two seasons, then we know his level.
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But it is pretty much indisputable that Denis Law was world class? Because why would he break transfer records three times, win the Ballon d'Or, score 46 goals in a season, have by far the best goal per game of any Man United player with 200+ goals, win the European Cup etc if he wasn't that good? Then you add the clips as evidence to it, nobody is making videos of Brian Kidd and claiming he was world-class.
I think you're overthinking it. A few people were a bit surprised that you wouldn't have Denis Law in your top 10 but if in your opinion you don't think there's enough evidence for his inclusion then that's fine.
It does make the whole exercise a bit pointless though. You might as well exclude Charlton and Best as well and just have a greatest United players to have played in the televised games era.
That’s the case will all historical figures, on that basis you could argue that Alexander the Great shouldn’t be considered one of the greatest military leaders in the history of mankind. Anyway, let’s agree to disagree.
If we'd replaced Schmeichel with Van Der Sar and kept Stam. We'd have won a lot more in the years Ruud was at the club.
He was a brilliant striker and if we're just talking peak vs peak, I'd have him above Beckham also.
I'd have Irwin above Neville all day. Far more talented player.
You also never see people argue the other way either, how can we say someone is the best of all-time when there's insufficient evidence of older players to prove that he is better than them.
Yeah or even replaced Stam with Sol Campbell who we were rumoured to be looking at in the summer of 2001.
Completely agree on Van Der Sar. Mental he went to Fulham when they were newly promoted. Though I suppose Barthez actually had a good first season...
I also think Fergie trying to evolve from 442 played a part in us not winning that match.
That work was needed though even it meant sacrificing some short term success.
Outside of the museum, there are twice as many statues of Denis Law at Old Trafford than there are of anyone else. The anyone else being Matt Busby, Jimmy Murphy, Alex Ferguson, Bobby Charlton and George Best. Not bad.
He was, I'm not disputing that for a second.
But on this list, many if not almost all of the players are also indeed world class.
What I'm disputing is how so many can invoke authority on how to properly rank Law's ability against anyone else on the list.
First of all, love your username.
Just played through MI again the other day.
And yes. He is part of our trinity.
The people with statues were all instrumental in our rebuilding and European success after Munich.
So he is without question one of our biggest legends. I have never disputed that. Nor would I dispute that he was indeed a world class player.
That's not the other way around, though.
It's the same analogy he provided, which is a fair one.