Manchester United might be going through a challenging period on the pitch at the moment, but over the last 24 years, they have been blessed with some truly great players.
The likes of Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Ruud van Nistelrooy are all icons of the game and helped the club to utterly dominate the Premier League in the 2000s, but while they have all hung up their boots, there is one more legend still powering on.
The player is, of course, Cristiano Ronaldo, who came to prominence at Old Trafford before moving to Real Madrid, where he somehow reached yet another level.
While the club were never quite able to replace the Portuguese superstar, there was a player they signed almost a decade ago who was compared to him, although things wouldn’t quite work out the same way.
Ronaldo’s first United spell
Ronaldo joined United for a fee of £12.4m in the summer of 2003, and while he was sometimes seen as a frustrating figure in his first season with the club, he quickly developed into a world-beater.
During his first stint with the Red Devils, the Funchal-born star made 292 appearances, scored 118 goals, provided 59 assists, and won everything there was to win in the club game.
In the space of six years, he would lift two League Cups, one FA Cup, three Premier Leagues, a Club World Cup and both his first Champions League and Ballon d’Or, before then sealing a world record £80m move to Real Madrid in the summer of 2009.
While the fee United received for their former number seven was massive for the time, there was still a desire to replace him.
Though they consistently failed over the years, there was a belief that they might have found their man six years later, only to be proven very, very wrong.
Memphis Depay’s United career
Yes, the player in question is former Dutch international Memphis Depay, but before the pitchforks come out, we are not the ones making the comparison to Ronaldo.
That comes courtesy of journalist Paul Parker, who wrote in May 2015, that the new United signing was ‘probably a better footballer than Cristiano Ronaldo was at 21’ and former teammate Leroy Fer who also believed he had it in him to do what the Portuguese legend did in England.
Now, that does sound ridiculous in retrospect, but in their defence, the Moordrecht-born dynamo was electric before moving to Old Trafford for £31m that summer.
For example, in just 124 appearances for PSV Eindhoven, he scored 50 goals and provided 29 assists, which is seriously impressive.
This record, combined with the fact that he would be working with his old national team boss, Louis van Gaal, at the Theatre of Dreams, let imaginations run wild about how good this promising young winger could be.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for it to become apparent that United did not, in fact, have their next Ronaldo, and after being ‘labelled the worst buy in the Premier League in 2015’ – something reiterated by Ruud Gullit – he left the club to join Ligue 1 side Lyon just two seasons later, with seven goals and five assists in 53 appearances to his name.
Things did improve for the then-22-year-old after that, as he would produce 131 goals and assists in 178 games for the French side before joining Barcelona in 2021, where he would produce 16 in 42 appearances and secure his final move in European football to Atlético Madrid in January 2023.
In the Spanish capital, the former United flop continued his middling to decent form and produced 15 goals and assists in 40 games. However, he left as a free agent in the summer and, after spending a few months without a club, joined Brazilian outfit Corinthians at just 30 years old. His actual market value sits around the £8m mark, a figure even lower than another flop in the shape of Antony. His value is about £20m.
Ultimately, while Depay was able to forge a decent career for himself in France and Spain after leaving England, it would be fair to say that he never got remotely close to becoming United’s next Ronaldo.
