De Gea as Man Utd number one is as useful as a BlackBerry in 2023

Tom Hancock

• Updated: 11 May 2023 18:13 BST
• 3 min read

In June 2011, Manchester United signed 20-year-old David de Gea from Atletico Madrid; three months later, BlackBerry user numbers peaked at 85 million worldwide.

You might be wondering what on earth a once prodigious goalkeeper and formerly popular smartphone have to do with each other – but it’s quite simple, really: both have become obsolete.

The difference is that while BlackBerry realised this and stopped producing their own phones in 2016, Man Utd have yet to see sense and discontinue De Gea; in fact, they want to extend his contract.

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Watching Man Utd recently has just reinforced the sense that this is a group of outfield players with no confidence in their ‘keeper – and that only spells trouble.

If you view a team as a series of lines – goalkeeper, defence, midfield and attack, with the three outfield strata further sub-divisible – each player is, to a certain point, only as good as what’s behind them – and when your last line of defence is so demonstrably flawed and inherently unsuited to the manager’s footballing philosophy then, well, to put it bluntly… you’re a bit screwed.

Man Utd should have moved on from De Gea years ago – but they’ve persisted – perhaps fooled by his deceptively strong 2021/22 showing, which earned him the club’s Players’ Player of the Year award – and it’s a mistake which might end up delaying their return to the Champions League.

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A BlackBerry in a sea of iPhones

Over the course of De Gea’s 12 years at Man Utd, the game has advanced at a pace he simply hasn’t been able to keep up with – rendering him a bumbling BlackBerry in a sea of increasingly intelligent iPhones.

Sure, the veteran Spaniard has kept a Premier League-high 15 clean sheets this season – but that just tells you that shutouts shouldn’t be used as an all-encompassing gauge of goalkeeping ability.

For his alarmingly frequent high-profile howlers – last week’s defeat-sealing gaffe at West Ham the latest addition to an ever-growing list – and the high-pressure situations he puts his teammates in as a result of his ineptitude in possession, De Gea has become undeniably detrimental to his side’s cause – and it’s high time Man Utd accepted that and acted decisively.