On the list

By Chris O'Brien
April 12 2015

Ten Manchester United players have appeared in World Soccer’s list of the planet’s most important 500 players.

Articles of features listing the ‘Top X’ players are commonplace in magazines and online – but World Soccer’s list is a little more high-brow.

“This is not intended to be a list of the ‘best 500’ players in the world.” writes the magazine.

“It’s impossible to compare players from different leagues and contents; any list is inevitably subjective”.

Instead, World Soccer has compiled a methodology which aims to look at which players are “the world’s most-talked about … most newsworthy … most important”.

Bayern Munich have the most players in the list (16), with Manchester United the third most featured English club behind Chelsea (13) and Manchester City (11).

The list boasts no particular order – reproduced alphabetically - and the 10 United names to make the cut are:

• Daley Blind
• David de Gea
• Angel Di Maria
• Radamel Falcao
• Ander Herrera
• Adnan Januza
• Juan Mata
• Marcos Rojo
• Wayne Rooney
• Robin van Persie