Éric Cantona was born on 24 May 1966 and played for Auxerre, Martigues, Marseille, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nîmes and Leeds United before joining Manchester United, where he won four Premier League titles in five years, including two league and cup Doubles. He retired unexpectedly in 1997, shortly before his thirty-first birthday. The shirts listed here come almost entirely from his Manchester United years, with a small group of France shirts alongside them. There are no Leeds shirts and nothing from his French clubs, so every item falls inside a narrow window in the 1990s.
Cantona wore the number 7 at Manchester United and was known for turning his collar up, which is the detail collectors look for on the 1992-94 and 1994-96 shirts. He scored 20 goals in 45 matches for France, appeared at Euro 1992 and was made captain in 1994, but the eight-month suspension that followed his 1995 assault on a spectator kept him out of Euro 96. His United career was framed by that ban.
Home shirts are the largest group, with away and third shirts making up most of the remainder, plus a graphic cotton tee. This is one of the dearer player listings on the site: the middle of the price range sits around two hundred pounds and the top items run past five hundred. Almost everything is second-hand and graded, with most pieces in the upper half of the ten-point scale; genuinely mint examples are rare. He was voted Manchester United’s greatest ever player in 2003.
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