Why Manchester United are actually the ideal club for David De Gea’s future

It’s now 55 years since Lev Yashin won the Ballon d’Or – the last goalkeeper to collect Europe’s premier individual award. More locally, it’s now 40 years since Peter Shilton was voted the PFA’s Player of the Year.

Both are special cases. Yashin was a national icon in the Soviet Union and a centrepiece of the great Dynamo Moscow sides of the 1950s and 1960s. He was a hero of Yuri Gagarin proportions, endowed with a set of enduring nicknames and who, when he died in 1990, was honoured with a state funeral.

Shilton’s career was more parochial. He may not have embedded himself in the English conscience in quite the same way, but he too was a generational player. Brian Clough’s No.1 was honoured by his fellow professionals in 1978, having won a league championship with Nottingham Forest in his first season at the club. Back-to-back European Cups followed in 1979 and 1980, and Shilton’s performance in the final of the second, against Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg, remains one of the great goalkeeping displays of all time.

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