Cristiano Ronaldo to Scott McTominay - the shirt number misery of a Manchester United obsessive

If you're a long-suffering Manchester United fan the odds are that you've bought a shirt at some point during your life and a smaller number of you may have gotten a shirt with your favourite player's name on it.

I have quite a few of these United shirts, but it might be time to stop.

Usually, after I've got the shirt with a player's name and number printed across the back, their careers coincidentally begin to go south.

So let's have a look at some of the shirts I own and why the careers of these players didn't turn out the way United hoped.

Shinji Kagawa (26)

With this one I'm cheating a bit as my 12/13 Kagawa shirt was given to me as a Secret Santa gift by Andy Tate a couple of years ago (now that is a claim to fame and if he's reading this, it's proudly sitting on my wall).

Kagawa was signed as a fantastic attacking number 10, but with Wayne Rooney occupying that position, the Japanese playmaker was deployed on the left where his effect was greatly reduced.

He never reached his potential and then was sold back to Borussia Dortmund three years later.

Eric Bailly (3)

Bailly is still a United player, which is a positive compared to Kagawa but his career again has not gone the way I expected when I went big on his number three.

After Bailly's consecutive man-of-the-match performances on his debut in the Community Shield and in the first game of the Premier League season, many United fans thought the club had finally found their replacement for the hard-tackling Nemanja Vidic.

But injuries have derailed his career and now he is reduced to a position on the bench with the occasional cameo.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan (22)

This one hurts the most. After his stunning campaign in the Europa League drove United to the trophy, I went