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.Gary Neville is one of only five players to have made more than 600 appearances for Manchester United, doing so between the glory-laden years of 1992 and 2011.The Bury-born United fan made 33 or more appearances in each of 12 consecutive seasons between 1995-96 and 2006-07, when injuries started to limit his numbers. Neville, who was also capped 85 times by England, was part of teams which won eight Premier Leagues and 13 cups, including the treble in 1999, when he was involved in 54 games. Only goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel outdid him in United’s greatest season.By his own admission, Neville was not as talented as his peers — in 2026, he told fellow defender Rio Ferdinand he was the least talented in the team — but he was utterly driven, the first into training each morning.“Gary Neville was my captain. United was the most important thing in his life and he was (Sir Alex) Ferguson’s man to maintain standards among players,” fellow full-back Patrice Evra said in his autobiography. “I only ever had one argument with Gary. Apart from that, he was very good to me. He’d showed me around houses when I first arrived in Manchester. When I wanted to see a priest, I expected to be taken to a church. Instead, he brought a priest to Carrington.”“What Sir Alex Ferguson wanted for us — and what I wanted for myself — was stability,” Neville told me in 2024. “I wanted the flatline, not to be up and down and full of shocks and surprises. I wanted to be consistent, as a footballer and as a person.“My whole game was about reliability and consistency, week in, week out for my team, getting the 6.5 or 7 out of 10, doing my job dependably, making sure I defended the back post, closed my winger down, was part of a good defensive unit, serving my forward players with good passes. That was my job. I wasn’t a Cristiano (Ronaldo) or a (Wayne) Rooney, an explosive player that could live a life being up and down all the time. I needed stability.”