George Best

He won the European Cup and the Ballon d'Or at twenty-two. He had left Manchester United by twenty-seven, and spent the next decade playing for Stockport County, Cork Celtic, Fulham, three American clubs, Hibernian, Bournemouth and a team in Brisbane.

He is the best player never to appear at a World Cup, and he is the reason the phrase exists.

George Best was born on 22 May 1946 in Belfast. His father worked in the shipyards; his mother had played hockey for Ireland. He passed the eleven-plus and went to a grammar school that specialised in rugby, so he stopped going and transferred to one that played football.

Bob Bishop, a Manchester United scout, watched him at fifteen and sent Matt Busby a telegram that Wikipedia quotes in full: "I think I've found you a genius."

He lasted two days in Manchester and went home to Belfast. Then he came back, spent two years as an amateur, worked as an errand boy on the Manchester Ship Canal, and trained twice a week.

He made his First Division debut on 14 September 1963, aged seventeen, against West Bromwich Albion. He scored in his second game.

Manchester United went to the Estádio da Luz for a European Cup quarter-final against Benfica, and Matt Busby told his wingers to sit deep for twenty minutes, keep it tight and quieten the crowd.

Best scored twice inside the first quarter of an hour. United won 5–1.

He came home wearing an oversized sombrero and was photographed on the tarmac at the airport. The headline was El Beatle. He was nineteen, and from that week he was famous in a way footballers had not previously been — not admired, famous, in the way pop musicians were famous, with the same photographers outside the same nightclubs.

Sean O'Hagan of the Guardian described what had happened: "Although the football pitch was his arena, Best was essentially a pop star — young, stylish, strikingly beautiful, possessed of a creative confidence that bordered on arrogance, and worshipped by young men and women alike."

On 29 May 1968 United played Benfica again, in the European Cup final at Wembley. It was ten years after Munich, and the team contained two survivors of it.

The match went to extra time at 1–1. Three minutes in, Best ran at the defence, dummied the goalkeeper José Henrique and rolled it into the empty net with his left foot. Brian Kidd and Bobby Charlton added two more. United won 4–1.

That season he scored twenty-eight league goals — joint top scorer in the First Division — and thirty-two in all competitions. He was voted Footballer of the Year, the youngest man ever to receive it, and won the Ballon d'Or ahead of Bobby Charlton, Dragan Džajić and Franz Beckenbauer.

He was twenty-two. It was the last trophy he ever won.

In an FA Cup tie at Northampton Town, in a mud-bath at the County Ground, he scored six in an 8–2 win. It is still a record for the competition.

The same season he scored twenty-three in total. Manchester United finished eighth.

Busby retired. The team that had won the European Cup got old at the same time, and United went from champions to relegation candidates in five years. Best carried them for as long as anyone could, and then stopped being willing to.

He said what that felt like: "I increasingly had the feeling that I was carrying the team at times on the pitch."

In 1970–71 he missed the train to a match at Chelsea to spend a weekend with the actress Sinéad Cusack and was suspended for two weeks. In December 1972 he disappeared to London nightclubs, was suspended again and transfer-listed at £300,000. He retired, unretired, and came back in April.

His last match for Manchester United was on 1 January 1974, a 3–0 defeat at Queens Park Rangers. Three days later he failed to appear for training and was dropped. He was twenty-seven.

Then came Jewish Guild in South Africa, Dunstable Town, three matches for Stockport County, three for Cork Celtic, two spells at Fulham alongside Bobby Moore and Rodney Marsh, three seasons with the Los Angeles Aztecs, Fort Lauderdale, Hibernian on a pay-per-play basis, San Jose, Bournemouth at thirty-six, and four games for Brisbane Lions in 1983 — exactly twenty years after he joined Manchester United.

He scored fifteen goals in twenty-four games in his first season in Los Angeles and was named the best midfielder in the league in his second. The talent never left. Everything around it did.

The drinking had started early and did not stop. In 1984 he served a prison sentence over drink-driving, assaulting a police officer and failing to answer bail.

In March 2000 he was told his liver was functioning at about twenty per cent. He had a transplant in the summer of 2002 at the Cromwell Hospital in London and haemorrhaged badly during the operation.

On 20 November 2005, from intensive care, he asked a newspaper to publish a photograph of him — jaundiced, unrecognisable — with three words underneath: Don't die like me.

He died five days later, on 25 November 2005, aged fifty-nine, of a lung infection and multiple organ failure.

His funeral was held at Stormont in Belfast on 3 December. Around a hundred thousand people lined the route; twenty-five thousand were inside the grounds. Belfast City Airport was renamed after him the following year, on what would have been his sixtieth birthday.

The Other column is the 1965 and 1967 Charity Shields, the 1968 Intercontinental Cup and two Watney Cup runs. It was missing here until 2026-09-19, which is why five of these seasons did not add across.

The itemised rows in the table above sum to 708 appearances and 253 goals. The career total on the last line, which is Wikipedia's, is 705 and 251. They do not reconcile, and we do not know why. Two further disagreements sit on the same page, also Wikipedia's: five seasons in the Manchester United table do not add across to its own subtotal, and Wikipedia's prose summary of his United career says 179 goals in 470 games where its table says 181 in 474. Nothing here has been adjusted to make either side agree — a table that adds up because someone made it add up is worse than one that visibly does not.

Thirty-seven caps in thirteen years — a number that tells you how rarely a small nation played, and how often he was not selected or not available. Northern Ireland did not qualify for a World Cup during his career.

In one of those matches, against England at Windsor Park on 15 May 1971, he flicked the ball off Gordon Banks's foot as the goalkeeper released it to kick downfield, and headed into the empty net. The referee disallowed it.

Individual: Ballon d'Or 1968, third in 1971. Footballer of the Year 1967–68, the youngest ever. First Division top scorer 1967–68 with 28. FA Cup top scorer 1971–72. Fifth in FIFA's Player of the Century jury vote. Eighth in World Soccer's greatest players of the twentieth century.

Joe Mercer, then managing Manchester City, in 1969: "It seems impossible to hurt him. All manner of men have tried to intimidate him. Best merely glides along, riding tackles and brushing giants aside like leaves."

Johan Cruyff: "What he had was unique, you can't coach it."

Franz Beckenbauer: "George Best was one of the most talented players of all time and probably the best footballer who never made it to a major world final."

Hugh McIlvanney, who wrote about him for twenty years: "With feet as sensitive as a pickpocket's hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was astonishing."

Pelé, Wikipedia records, declared that Best was the greatest footballer he had ever seen.

And Best himself, who was funnier about it than anyone: "I spent a lot of money on booze, girls and fast cars — the rest I just squandered."

Also, less comfortably: "I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak. Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town."

The record is 181 goals for Manchester United and one European Cup and one Ballon d'Or, all of it done by twenty-two, and a further nine years of football played in places that had no business hosting him.

The argument about what he could have been is unanswerable and has been running for fifty years. What is not in dispute is that for about five seasons, in a league full of defenders permitted to kick him, nobody could get the ball off him.