David de Gea might have to prove himself all over again at Manchester United

When David de Gea walks out at Selhurst Park on Sunday he will move to within 13 games of becoming only the 11th player to reach 500 games for Manchester United. It will be the third time in four seasons that De Gea has been involved in every Premier League fixture and only Cristiano Ronaldo can stop him from winning a fifth player of the year award.

The Spaniard might only have one Premier League title to his name for all those years of toil, but his status as a United great isn’t in question. He has been one of the very few players to emerge from the wreckage of this season with any credit in the bank, but rewind to last summer and it could all have been so different.

For the first time since he established himself as United’s undisputed No. 1, De Gea faced a major challenge last season from Dean Henderson, an academy graduate with ambitions of dethroning the Spaniard.

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Henderson and De Gea shared a similar workload in 2020/21 and at the end of that season Ole Gunnar Solskjaer admitted his goalkeeping situation was unsustainable. Something had to give.

Last summer Solskjaer was edging towards making Henderson his first-choice goalkeeper and the Manchester Evening News understands the Norwegian would have allowed De Gea to leave the club, either on loan or permanently.

De Gea’s £375,000-a-week wages would have made a season as a second-choice goalkeeper untenable and it looked like the curtain was close to coming down on his United career.

But Henderson contracted Covid-19 in July and struggled to shake off the after-effects of the virus. De Gea was required to start the Premier League season and he was an impressive performer in the early weeks of the