How many games have Manchester United actually played?

Manchester United’s 2-2 draw in Lyon on Thursday in the Europa League was, according to some online sources, their 6,000th game of football.

The club, which was originally called Newton Heath, has certainly come a long way since being formed by the carriage and wagon department of the local railway company in 1878 — a record (for now) 20 English top-flight titles, 13 FA Cup wins and being three times champions of Europe is not a bad resume. Not to mention all the other various trophies they have picked up over the years.

But was the match in France this week really Manchester United’s 6,000th? If not, how many games have they actually played and why is there some doubt over the official figure? And while we are at it, did Wayne Rooney in fact equal, not break, Sir Bobby Charlton’s goalscoring record for the club?

Here, The Athletic will attempt to explain.

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Why is there confusion?

The crux of the matter is which games count as ‘official’ matches.

In modern football it is largely obvious which do and which don’t — pre-season friendlies are not official games but, once they are out of the way, every match within some form of recognised competition (so excluding winter-break friendlies) played by a top-flight club’s first team is added to the record books.

However, the issue with whether or not United reached 6,000 games on Thursday concerns four now-defunct competitions in which the club competed and whether or not they held (and still hold) official status.

The competitions in question are the Watney Cup, the Anglo-Italian Cup, the Football League Super Cup and the Football League Centenary Trophy.

What were these competitions?

The Watney Cup was held before the start of the season from 1970 to 1973. With a few exceptions, it was contested by the eight teams that had scored the most goals in England’s top four divisions in the previous campaign. It featured two teams from each division, but not those playing in Europe, nor promoted sides. Manchester United played three Watney Cup games in 1970 and another in 1971. They lost in the final against Derby County in the first year and in the first round against Halifax Town in the second.

The Anglo-Italian Cup, as the name suggests, was a competition between clubs from England and Italy. United played four games in it in 1973 (its fourth staging), with these matches taking place between mid-February and early May. Tommy Docherty’s side were eliminated at the group stage after two wins and two draws.

The Football League Super Cup was held in the 1985-86 season for the six English clubs that had qualified for European competition but could not take up their places due to the ban imposed by UEFA following the Heysel Stadium disaster in May 1985. United again played four games in this competition and were knocked out in the groups. These matches were held from September to December (the competition wasn’t staged again due to a lack of general interest).

And, finally, the Football League Centenary Trophy was held during the 1988-89 season to celebrate 100 years since the founding of the English Football League.

The teams that had finished in the top eight in the First Division the previous campaign competed and United lost to Arsenal in the final at Villa Park in October, which was their third and final game in the competition. Sir Alex Ferguson was the Manchester United manager for the three matches — more on that later.

So, that comes to a total of 15 matches. If you count them all as official, then United have played 6,015 matches in their history and number 6,000 was their 2-1 victory over Rangers in the Europa League at Old Trafford on January 23.

But how many of these matches really were, and remain, official fixtures?

The club, who haven’t commented on the 6,000-game landmark, do not consider these matches to have been official. The data on their website detailing the number of games in which their past players were involved does not include appearances in these competitions.

However, Opta, the world’s leading sports data and analytics company who provide the statistics for the top football leagues around the globe, count the 15 games played as proper matches. The English National Football Archive, an online database listing every official game played in the country’s history, also classes these competitions as official.

This is largely because they were not friendlies and, other than the Watney Cup, were all played in-season.

Of the four competitions, the Watney Cup is probably the one with the biggest question mark hanging over it, mainly because it took place before the season started. However, even if the four games United played in the competition are scrubbed from the records, they are still on 6,011.

Not only does that put United beyond the 6,000-game mark, Opta and the English National Football Archive’s stance throws up a few quirky conundrums. It would mean Ferguson was in charge for 1,503 games — not the neat 1,500 that was touted when he retired in 2013.

Also, by this verdict, Ryan Giggs did not poignantly break Charlton’s club appearance record of 758 in the 2008 Champions League final — he was still six matches behind at that point as Charlton played four times in the Watney Cup and three times in the Anglo-Italian Cup, therefore totalling 765 United matches.

It is worth pointing out that wartime matches which were held during both the First and Second World Wars are, unlike these four competitions, universally considered to have been unofficial.

Are there other implications when including those games?

Well, most notably of all, it would mean Rooney — who scored 253 times for the club from 2004 to 2017 — only equalled Charlton’s long-standing goals record for the club. He did not break it.

Charlton’s total has long been accepted to have been 249 goals but, according to the English National Football Archive, he scored twice in the Watney Cup and twice in the Anglo-Italian Cup across those seven appearances which, if those games were indeed official, means the Englishman actually finished on 253 goals when he left the club in 1973.

The issue was raised in the media when Rooney scored his 250th for the club, but only concerning Charlton’s two Anglo-Italian Cup goals. Given Rooney reached 253, it became a moot point. At the time United said that the two Charlton goals — scored during his final United appearance, a 4-1 win against Hellas Verona in May 1973 — did not count.

However, during the process of researching this article, The Athletic has discovered that Charlton scored two goals in the Watney Cup against Reading in August 1970 which, if counted, would leave the two men level at the top.

More trivially, if Bryan Robson’s goal in the Football League Super Cup in 1985 is counted, it would mean he scored 100 goals for United, not 99.

How do other clubs view these competitions?

Interestingly, Liverpool have taken the opposite view to United. They have always maintained that Ian Rush scored 346 goals for them — a record total that includes seven goals in the Football League Super Cup in 1986.

It may seem odd to a casual observer that, in a sport as well documented as football, two of its biggest clubs disagree over the status of past competitions in which they have participated. However, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when companies like Opta did not exist, it was largely down to the clubs themselves — alongside Rothmans Football Yearbook and newspapers — to record the results and details of matches. So with no central database upon which to rely, it is understandable discrepancies arose.

It should also be noted that the status of the Community Shield, formally the Charity Shield, has caused similar problems in the past. Jimmy Greaves’ all-time goals record for Tottenham Hotspur was listed, by the club, to be 266 — but that excluded two goals in the 1962 curtain-raiser against Ipswich Town.

Harry Kane broke Greaves’ record in 2023 and finished on 280 goals, so it is largely frivolous now. Yet Opta, the English National Football Archive and almost all other clubs (including Manchester United), do consider the Community Shield to be an official match.

Back to United. Were the matches in these four competitions official?

Given that other clubs mostly do count the games they played in in these competitions as official and that Opta and the English National Football Archive do, too, it seems reasonable to conclude that all 15 matches were legitimate and therefore the 6,000-mark was reached in late January. Similarly, we should conclude that Charlton did indeed score 253 goals for Manchester United.

After all, trophies were handed out at the conclusion of each competition. Not counting them expunges these tournaments from history for no incontrovertible reason.

Yet, rightly or wrongly, Manchester United have long considered games in these four competitions to be unofficial — so they are hardly going to be ripping up their record books anytime soon.

And while clearly there are more important issues in football than this, it is at the very least a curiosity that one of the world’s most famous clubs ignores four competitions in which their first team played.

(Top photo: Peter Robinson/EMPICS via Getty Images)