Paul Scholes Questions Lammens' Ability as Manchester United's No.1
Paul Scholes has never been one to sugar-coat it. And he hasn’t started now.
The Manchester United great has delivered a stark warning over current No.1 Lammens, questioning whether the 24-year-old Belgian is good enough to anchor a title-winning side.
Lammens arrived from Royal Antwerp for £21.7 million last summer and has already forced Altay Bayindir out of the picture to become Michael Carrick’s first-choice goalkeeper. He has the shirt. Scholes is not yet convinced he has the stature.
On The Good, The Bad and The Football podcast, Scholes went straight for the heart of the issue: the standard required between the posts for a team with genuine ambitions.
“What team have you seen win the Premier League without a top class goalkeeper?” he asked. “Lammens might be that, I don't know, I think the jury's probably still out on that and then you build from the back four.”
That line – “the jury's still out” – hangs over United’s season like a cloud.
Carrick is trying to rebuild a fractured side, to give United a clear identity again after years of drift. Scholes sees echoes of what their rivals have done: build from the back, sort the defence, lock down the goalkeeper, and only then talk about titles.
He pointed to the template that has reshaped the top of the Premier League.
“It's the way Arsenal started three or four years ago, defensively they have been absolutely brilliant. You need a top class goalkeeper.
You think of Liverpool's team with Alisson, Raya at Arsenal, Man United with Peter Schmeichel and Edwin van der Sar. They've all got brilliant, brilliant goalkeepers. You start from the back, of course you do. Whether Michael's just got to be patient and wait for that, I don't know.”
Names that define eras: Schmeichel. Van der Sar. Alisson. Now Raya. That’s the company Scholes believes a serious challenger must keep in goal. Right now, Lammens is fighting just to be mentioned in the same breath.
The Belgian has never hidden his ambition. He wants to stay at Old Trafford for a decade, to be more than a stopgap, to carve his name into the club’s goalkeeping lineage rather than simply pass through it.
He also knows exactly what comes with the territory.
“That's England for you,” he said last year, reflecting on the Premier League spotlight. “If things go badly, they can bury you deep, but if things go well, they praise you to the skies.
I take that with a grain of salt, because to be mentioned in the same sentence as Schmeichel, I'm going to have to prove myself many more times. But I did find it a very nice compliment. I hope to play here for 10 years and be important, so that, like Schmeichel and Van der Sar, I can leave a legacy.”
Those words sounded aspirational then. They sound more loaded now.
Scholes’ latest comments come in the wake of a bruising Manchester derby, where Lammens could not keep out Erling Haaland and United fell short again on the biggest domestic stage. It was hardly a one-man failure – United were second best across the pitch – but Scholes zoomed in on the position that, in his mind, separates contenders from pretenders.
In games like that, he clearly believes, an elite, proven, era-defining goalkeeper can tilt the balance.
For Lammens, every outing from here carries extra weight. Every save will be held up against the standard of Schmeichel and Van der Sar. Every mistake will feed the narrative that Carrick may ultimately need an upgrade if United are serious about climbing back to the summit.
The Belgian has the gloves, the talent, and the stage. What he doesn’t have yet is the one thing Scholes insists United must find: an undisputed, title-winning presence in goal.
The question now is brutal and simple – can Lammens grow into that role fast enough for a club that no longer has patience to spare?
