Welcome to a new series, in which I pick and rank the 25 greatest Manchester United players. I’m sure 100 per cent of you will agree with every selection and their exact order…Of course, this is highly subjective. I’ll be revealing the order, one by one, over the next few weeks, and to kick things off I wanted to explain some of my reasoning.Number of appearances and goals scored in the case of strikers and midfielders (or assists in the case of Bruno Fernandes) play an important part. A member of the great Manchester United sides has a better chance of being placed high up than one who was in a less successful team. There are more stats and video evidence for contemporaries, and no evidence of xG for players of yore, other than the press cuttings and memories.So, as I’ve only watched United with my own eyes since the 1980s, like any historian I have reverted to written sources (some 200 United books I own), plus thousands of newspaper cuttings. I also have nearly 40 years of interviews of my own to draw on, where I have spoken to players about players. They were published in magazines, newspapers or one of the 14 books I’ve written.Some of the players hadn’t been interviewed for years and were delighted that I’d tracked them down. David Herd, a fantastic striker for United in the 1960s, ran a garage close to where I grew up in Manchester and had long been ‘forgotten’ by the media when I met him in the mid-1990s. He called a few weeks later, delighted that his grandchildren had been able to read about how good he was. Herd, though a brilliant striker, does not make the list.