Ji-sung Park is one of the great unsung heroes in Premier League history, but do Manchester United currently have the attacking quality to offset the limited goal contributions of his Old Trafford regen?
After joining United from PSV Eindhoven for just £4m in 2005, Park made over 200 appearances for the Red Devils and was frequently leaned upon by Sir Alex Ferguson in the toughest fixtures as a reliable 7/10 player in a squad brimming with star talent which would frequently be snubbed in favour of the South Korean.
Park won eight major titles with United, including four Premier Leagues and the Champions League, and Ferguson believes they would have won another had he used the midfielder to man-mark Lionel Messi in the 2011 final.
“That’s where I lost the final against Barcelona at Wembley,” Ferguson said. “I should have changed at half-time and put Ji-Sung Park on Messi. That was a mistake.”
Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and Dimitar Berbatov were just some of the highly-skilled forwards to have shared the pitch with Park, whose standout attribute was his extraordinary ability to get around the pitch and snap into challenges to win the ball back for United. He was a pressing demon before it became so in vogue.
And the weight of numbers of those he was playing with offset Park’s relatively meagre contributions – he got 19 goals and 23 assists in 154 Premier League appearances across his seven seasons at Old Trafford.
Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha – promising though their starts to life at United have been – offer nothing like the same goals/assists buffer as Ronaldo, Rooney et al. Which begs the question, can Ruben Amorim afford to include the new Ji-sung Park in his starting XI?
On the Stick to Football podcast, Gary Neville said: “Do you know what I think about [Mason] Mount? He reminds me, say, Darren Anderton or Adam Lallana, Ji-Sung Park, maybe a little bit.
“Players who do that sort of ugly bit well, but they also connect and glue things with, like, he starts the press.”
But Roy Keane doesn’t think Mount is worthy of a place in Amorim’s starting XI, pointing out his poor record in what he believes is his baffling selection.
He said: “That’s a head-scratcher, I think. He’s doing well to get in the starting United team, Mount.
“A lot of managers have loved him over the years, he was the main man with England for a while, Chelsea of course and now obviously the manager wants to put him in.
“But you go back to stats as an attacking player. At United, his stats when he’s played are really poor. It’s not as if you’re going, yeah I can see he’s getting a lot of assists, his stats are really poor.”
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Mount has scored one goal this season but has managed just two further Premier League goals since his arrival from Chelsea in 2023, and remarkably, is yet to provide an assist in his 37 games in the top flight for the Red Devils.
Park’s inclusion could be seen as something of a luxury afforded to Ferguson, made possible by the goal contribution machines he was playing with.
But it’s impossible to know whether those more creative and deadly players would have racked up those numbers without Park scrapping for possession alongside them.
Amorim is faced with the same chicken-and-egg scenario with regard to Mount, but without the goals and assists in the team besides to nullify his shocking lack of quantifiable contribution to points on the board for Manchester United.