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 over this summer, in reverse order. He explains his thought process here.There are two players in this greatest list who were raised within five miles of each other south of Wrexham, north Wales. Billy Meredith was the first, a giant of football in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the sport’s first celebrity (he endorsed boots, Oxo and herbal remedies) and an unlikely looking one at that, with his thin frame that earned him the nickname ‘Old Skinny’. His stature would come from what he did in football.After starting out in localish football (Chirk, Northwich Victoria, Wrexham) he joined Manchester City in 1894, where his debut was at Newcastle United. Meredith’s problem was that he was employed full time as a miner in Chirk, where he had started working after school, aged 12.After slaving in the pit, he caught a train at 2am, arriving on Tyneside at 11am. He played for City, who lost 5-4, then took a return train and went straight back to the coalface.Meredith became a star at City, the club he had joined because a miners’ strike meant he needed to supplement his income. He helped them win the Second Division in 1899 and the FA Cup in 1904, becoming captain. A deeply religious Welsh Methodist and family-orientated man, he hadn’t wanted to be a footballer — he was quite content in the mines, but his talent would push him into football.Meredith also refused to move to Manchester, instead commuting from Wales. It didn’t harm his career: the fleet-heeled right-winger was nicknamed the Welsh Wizard and was skinning defenders.“Once I had the ball I knew what was expected of me, to beat the wing-half and the full-back, take the ball down to the corner and centre,” he wrote in Titbits magazine in 1947.