Who are the greatest players in Manchester United’s history? The Athletic gave Andy Mitten the task of compiling his top 25, and we are counting them down this summer, in reverse order.
He explains his thought process here.
When I told Nemanja Vidic he was under consideration to be on this list of Manchester United’s 25 greatest players, he joked it would be a talking point in the bars of his hometown of Uzice, Serbia. “I think Uzice will be proud,” he replied confidently.
Later, he declared he should only be on the list if he was alongside Rio Ferdinand. That wasn’t his decision, but, truthfully, it helped get another player into this list.
Vidic has a point, though, for he and Ferdinand, who became the best central defensive partnership in world football as United became English, European and world champions in 2008, were the sum of both their contrasting talents.
Vidic signed from Spartak Moscow for £7.2million ($12.6m) in 2006. After a year, Ferguson said: “We’ve done well there. He has that mentality of the proper, authentic defender. Watch Vidic in training, and he’ll batter (Louis) Saha and then pick him up, as if to say, ‘This is my job, this is what I do’. I’ll be yelling from the touchline, ‘Watch the tackling, watch the tackling’, and Vidic will shout, ‘Sorry boss, sorry boss’. But he’s not sorry at all, he just loves defending.”
Vidic has the distinction of having the highest win percentage of any established Manchester United player in history. Of his 300 games for the club, the Reds won 204 of them — 68 per cent. The most important of those arguably came in Moscow on May 21, 2008, the Champions League final against Chelsea.
He deserves inclusion because he excelled for a team that became the best in the world. He became one of United’s most important players and, to this day, the only defender to be named Premier League Player of the Season twice.
Nemjanja Vidic reacts to making top 25 greatest Man Utd players
There are some superb central defenders who have not made our list, which just highlights the level Vidic reached. There were 90s legends Steve Bruce, Gary Pallister and Jaap Stam, a world-class defender who left too soon, not that he had much say in it.
“Jaap Stam came in and did very well, but he was never really replaced until Nemanja arrived in a move that turned out to be great value for money,” defender Paul Parker told me in 2011. “Vidic is very consistent and rarely makes mistakes, but if he does, then his recovery rate is very high. One advantage Vida has over Steve Bruce, who he reminds me of, is his pace. Another is his experience of playing international football and club football in several countries. You need that now at a club like United.”
And Ferdinand? In 2012, I went to Villarreal to interview their Brazilian striker Nilmar. Asked to name the best he’d ever played against, he said: “Rio Ferdinand for Manchester. I played against him for Lyon. He’s fast and his positioning was perfect. Thiago (Silva) is very good at Milan too.”
Manchester United won the Champions League in 2008 with Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand at the heart of their defence (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
“Rio is technically better on the ball, a leader in the team who always talks,” defender Gerard Pique, who had to leave United to get the first-team minutes he deserved at Barcelona, told me in 2010. “Rio is deceivingly strong — I saw that in the gym at Carrington, but on the pitch he’ll get closer to strikers to stop them turning, whereas Vida is more aggressive. He sees every game as a battle in which he must win. Vida is solid. You would fancy him to win any 50-50 ball. You would still fancy him if two opposing players went for the same ball as him. They are two of the best centre-backs in the world and probably the best central defensive partnerships in the world, certainly a reason United don’t concede many goals.
“I learn from him and Rio every time I watch them play. It’s the nuances, the little details which help improve my game. They share many similar qualities: both are tall, quick, hard players who read the game well and anticipate attacks, yet there are differences and they complement each other.”
“Rio was a classy player who read the game well,” John O’Shea told me in 2024. “He didn’t wait and smash a player; he’d just get to the ball first by reading it well. A good operator who’d talk and organise. In later years, he’d end up complementing Vida so well.”
Rio was the smiley joker, Vidic more serious. He’d watched his home town be bombed by NATO when he ran to escape a missile before he became a footballer and established his name at Red Star Belgrade — where Vidic saw a 20-year-old friend and team-mate die of a heart attack in training.
“Good on and off the pitch,” is how Vidic describes his relationship with Ferdinand, who’d signed from Leeds United for a record fee for a defender in 2002. “We didn’t socialise together much but we had an understanding and liked to talk about football. It’s important that two players who play alongside each other get on well.
“I’d say the same of central defenders and forwards; you need to get on. Ninety per cent of the conversations I had in my life with Rio were about football. Rio was keen and driven — he wanted to talk. He’d not won any trophies for three years as a United player before I arrived and he was desperate for a partner.
“My point is that we all had the same target then. We were there to play for the biggest club in the world, we knew what the aim was — to win the biggest trophies. At smaller clubs you don’t have the same aims but you still have aims and expectations, but at Man United, where every team plays 100 per cent against you, you should always play like it’s your last year: 90 per cent is not enough and the current players should play like that.
“You should be scared that you’re not going to be there next season and you must fight to stop yourself going because it’s only when you leave Man United that you realise how big Man United is.”
