Gary Neville

By Craig · Published 9 November 2026

Gary Neville played 400 Premier League games, all of them for Manchester United, the club he supported as a boy. He won eight league titles, took the armband when Roy Keane left and won 85 England caps. Then he went to Sky Sports and turned out to be as good at explaining the game as he was at playing it.

Clubs

Manchester United

Premier League

400 appearances, 5 goals

Honours

Premier League (eight: 1995/96, 1996/97, 1998/99, 1999/00, 2000/01, 2002/03, 2006/07, 2008/09), FA Cup (three), League Cup (three), Champions League 1998/99 and 2007/08, Intercontinental Cup 1999, Club World Cup 2008

International

85 England caps

Fantasy price

£5.0m in 1995/96

How he arrived

Neville joined United as an apprentice when he left school in 1991. In his first season the youth team won the FA Youth Cup, and that group became the Class of '92. His first-team debut came on 16 September 1992, a goalless UEFA Cup draw at home to Torpedo Moscow.

He waited a while for more. He made one Premier League appearance in 1993/94 and 18 in 1994/95. Then, in1995/96, Alex Ferguson gave regular places to Nicky Butt, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and both Neville brothers. Gary played 31 league games at right-back, United won the double, and the other players voted him into the PFA Team of the Year. He was the only player from the champions in it.

He kept the shirt for the next decade and a half. In November 2005 Keane left, and the club captaincy passed to the lifelong fan from the youth team.

The moment: Liverpool, 22 January 2006

Liverpool came to Old Trafford in January 2006 and the game was goalless going into the last minute. Then Ryan Giggs swung in a free kick and Rio Ferdinand headed the winner on 90 minutes.

Neville went the length of the pitch. In front of the Liverpool fans, who had been giving him abuse all afternoon, he grabbed his shirt and gestured at them. His brother Phil, working for Sky that day, wasn't surprised: "every time United beat Liverpool, my brother always does that."

The FA charged him with improper conduct. In February a disciplinary hearing, which he joined by video link, fined him £5,000 and warned him about his future conduct. Ferguson said "too much has been made of it." Neville was blunter: "Being a robot, devoid of passion and spirit is obviously the way forward."

The win didn't change much. Chelsea were still 14 points clear and went on to win thetitle. But it's the clip people reach for when they want to explain what the rivalry meant to him. He wasn't a footballer playing for United. He was a United fan who happened to be the captain.

Why the streets won't forget

Right-backs don't usually get stories. Neville scored five Premier League goals in 400 games and none in 85 internationals. What he did was turn up. He was in the PFA Team of the Year in 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 2004/05 and 2006/07, played 34 league games in the 1999 Treble season, and was part of more than 100 Premier League clean sheets. The Premier League put him in its Hall of Fame in 2025.

Ferguson's verdict was simple: "Gary was the best English right-back of his generation." He became England's most-capped right-back, and played at Euro 96, the 1998 World Cup, Euro 2000, Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup. A broken foot kept him out of 2002.

The last few years were harder. He didn't play a single league game in 2007/08, came back to win the title again in 2008/09, and gave up the team captaincy in September 2010. His last game was a 2-1 win at West Brom on New Year's Day 2011. On 2 February he retired, after 602 games for United. "I have been a Manchester United fan all my life and fulfilled every dream I've ever had," he said.

That makes him an interesting retro pick: 14 draftable seasons, all with one club, and United won the league in eight of them.

Where is he now

Sky Sports signed him for the start of 2011/12, replacing Andy Gray on Monday Night Football. From May 2012 he was also a coach on Roy Hodgson's England staff, a role he kept until 2016.

In December 2015 he took his first manager's job, at Valencia. It lasted less than four months. He won three of his 16 La Liga games, lost 7-0 at Barcelona in a Copa del Rey semi-final, and was sacked at the end of March 2016 with the team 14th. "I understand that we are in business based on results," he said. He went back to Sky for 2016/17.

He is still there. In late October 2026 he was on Sky Sports giving his view on Michael Carrick staying in charge at United, and criticising the players on his Sky podcast after a 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth. He also launched The Overlap on YouTube in 2021.

Off the pitch he is a businessman in Manchester. He started a hospitality company with Ryan Giggs in 2013, is behind the St Michael's development in the city centre, and is involved in University Academy 92, which opened in Old Trafford in 2019.

Then there's Salford City. The Class of '92 bought the non-league club in 2014 and took it into the Football League. In May 2025 a new ownership group took over, with Neville and David Beckham alongside Declan Kelly and Lord Mervyn Davies. "I am passionate about Salford City," Neville said. They lost the League Two play-off final 3-0 to Notts County at Wembley in May 2026, so they are still in League Two this season.

Which seasons can you draft him in?

Fourteen. He isn't in the game's squads for 2007/08, when injury kept him out all season, or for 2010/11.

Want him at right-back for your retro fantasy football team? Draft a squad from1995/96.