Senne Lammens is the man in possession of United’s goalkeeping shirt this season, and our profile of the Belgian now wearing the gloves makes the case for his No.1 status. But he has joined the most demanding job in the club’s history, because the standard was set by giants. United have been blessed with extraordinary goalkeepers in every era — shot-stoppers, organisers, penalty heroes and men whose greatness went far beyond football. Here is our ranking of the seven greatest.
7. Fabien Barthez
The most entertaining goalkeeper United have ever had, and occasionally the most alarming. A World Cup and European Championship winner with France, Barthez arrived in 2000 as Schmeichel’s long-term replacement and won two league titles with a style built on audacity: coming for crosses others would not touch, dribbling past forwards, distributing like a midfielder. The mistakes were spectacular too, and they shorten his legacy — but on his best days he was a genuinely elite goalkeeper, and Old Trafford never had a dull afternoon with him in goal.
6. Gary Bailey
The nearly man of United goalkeeping, and one of its bravest. Bailey emerged as a teenager in the late 1970s, produced a string of saves in the 1979 FA Cup final that came within minutes of winning it, and was first choice for the best part of a decade — including the cup triumphs of 1983 and 1985. Recurring knee injuries ended his career at just 28, which is why his name is not higher on lists like this. Those who watched him know: fit and in form, Bailey was as good as any goalkeeper in England.
5. Alex Stepney
The last line of the 1968 European Cup-winning team. Stepney made more than 500 appearances across more than a decade, won the league in 1967 and stood in goal at Wembley when United became champions of Europe — his late save from Eusébio, one-on-one in the final, is one of the most important stops in the club’s history, preserving the draw that took the game to extra time. Reliable, unspectacular in the best sense, and the foundation stone of Matt Busby’s final great side.
4. Harry Gregg
No ranking of character in United’s history starts anywhere else. Gregg was a fine goalkeeper — a star of the Busby Babes’ final season — but his immortality was earned at Munich in February 1958, when, having survived the crash himself, he went back into the burning wreckage again and again to pull out fellow passengers, including a mother and baby and his team-mates. He then played on, remarkably, within weeks, and gave United years more service. Goalkeepers are judged on saves. Gregg made the greatest ones any United player has ever made, and none of them were on a football pitch.
3. David de Gea
For a decade, De Gea was United’s insurance policy, and frequently their entire defence. More than 500 appearances, a Premier League title in Ferguson’s final season, an FA Cup, and a club-record run of Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year awards — he won the fans’ honour four times, more than any player in the club’s history at that point. Between roughly 2014 and 2018, as the team around him declined, he produced a standard of pure shot-stopping — with his feet as often as his hands — that arguably no goalkeeper in the world could match. His later years were bumpier, and his distribution never suited the modern game, but the peak was extraordinary.
2. Edwin van der Sar
The calm after the storm. United spent five years searching for Schmeichel’s successor before signing Van der Sar from Fulham, aged 34, for a modest fee — and he turned out to be one of the greatest bargains in the club’s history. Four league titles, and in Moscow in 2008, the penalty shootout save from Nicolas Anelka that won the Champions League. Van der Sar’s genius was positional: he made difficult saves look routine because he was always in the right place, and he organised the Ferdinand–Vidic defence into the finest unit in Europe. He walks into our all-time Premier League XI in some picks and pushes the No.1 on this list harder than anyone.
1. Peter Schmeichel
The greatest goalkeeper of the Premier League era, and the foundation of everything Ferguson built. Signed for a fee in the region of half a million pounds that Ferguson himself called the bargain of the century, the Great Dane redefined the position in England: the star-jump spread, the throws that launched counter-attacks, the fury at his own defenders, and a one-on-one record that made strikers beat themselves. Five league titles, three FA Cups, and as captain — with the armband on, in the Nou Camp in 1999 — the Treble. Goalkeepers do not usually define eras. Schmeichel defined the biggest one in this club’s history, and every United keeper since, Lammens included, is measured against him.
