Three-Time Premier League Champion Retires After Leaving Man Utd | OneFootball

Jonny Evans has retired from professional football after his Manchester United exit was confirmed by the club, it has been revealed.

The 37-year-old centre-back enjoyed a trophy-laden career at United across two spells, amassing 241 appearances for the club and 12 trophies, including a trio of Premier League titles and the 2008 Champions League crown.

After Evans appeared in United’s second postseason Asian friendly on Friday, The Athletic’s Andy Mitten was the first to report that the defender was “hanging up his boots”. United had already confirmed that the squad’s oldest player would not be handed a new deal this summer and Fabrizio Romano supported Mitten’s retirement report on Saturday morning.

Evans was rarely first-choice during his opening stint at Old Trafford, only once starting in more than half of a season’s Premier League games while acting as an able deputy to the legendary defensive duo of Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidić.

Yet, rather than replace that ageing pairing, Evans was allowed to join West Bromwich Albion in 2015. The Northern Ireland icon, who amassed 107 international appearances, blossomed into one of the Premier League’s most reliable defensive figures and helped Leicester City win the club’s first-ever FA Cup in 2021.

During that triumphant season, then-United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær sighed: “Jonny Evans should have been a Man Utd player now, of course.” Erik ten Hag had taken over at Old Trafford by the time Evans made his belated return to Manchester in the summer of 2023.

Jonny Evans scored 30 goals in 643 professional appearances for club and country. / IMAGO/Sebastian Frej

Initially offered the chance to keep himself fit by training alongside the club’s under-21s once his contract at Leicester had expired, United handed Evans a short-term deal so that he could make up the numbers for a couple of preseason friendlies. That temporary stay lasted two years.

A raft of injuries coupled with Evans’s enduring reliability—a quality few other defenders in the squad could boast—prompted Ten Hag to hand the veteran centre-back 15 Premier League starts in the 2023–24 campaign, the same tally as £82 million ($110.4 million) recruit Antony.

During that turbulent season, which ended with Evans on the pitch lifting the FA Cup trophy, Ferdinand described his former teammate as the club’s “best defender.” “When he first signed, and even though he’s my mate and I played with him, I was like: ‘Flippin’ hell, how are we signing Jonny at this time?! Are we going backwards?’

“But he’s come in and when he has been asked to do a job, he’s done it really, really well.”

Sir Alex Ferguson, the revered manager who oversaw Evans’s arrival in United’s academy as a spindly teenager more than two decades ago, was never shy to praise the promising recruit. “He’s got a wonderful temperament. He’s quick, he reads the game and he has a good technique on the ball,” Ferguson told the BBC in 2006. “He’s got everything.”

The pace may have faded but the other qualities were only sharpened by the passage of time. Despite an injury-impacted campaign to conclude his career, Evans will be missed by a Manchester United team which lacks a lot of his intangible excellence.