David O'Leary ⭑ From A-Z since '92

The fates were pulling David O'Leary to Leeds as early as 1973, when he quite correctly rejected the chance to sign for Manchester United. Instead he moved from Dublin to London, where he had been born, signing for Arsenal and delighting his Gunners-supporting father.

It took another twenty years to separate O'Leary from the Gunners, and even longer for him to make a significant mark in Yorkshire by managing Leeds on their Champions League adventure. But it wasn't long after he ascending to Arsenal's first team defence as a precocious centre-half that the Republic of Ireland capped him, against England, in 1976. 

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Ireland's player-manager was John Giles, who told his young defender, "If you find yourself getting into trouble just give me the ball. Give it me even if three of their players are around me. I can handle it." O'Leary was impressed by his manager's "tremendous attitude", and by the words England's manager had for him in the tunnel after the game. "God bless him, Don [Revie] said he thought I would be in the game for a long time."

A decade later the Republic were being managed by another legend of Leeds, Jack Charlton, but there was no kinship between centre-backs. After O'Leary declined to change his holiday plans when injuries to others meant a late call-up to a summer tournament, Charlton, in turn, declined to take O'Leary to Euro '88, or to pick him at all for more than two years. "I don't want you bringing the ball out and fannying around with it the way you do at Arsenal," Jack once told him.

O'Leary had, by 1988, given Arsenal the benefit of an extraordinary fifteen years of service, with five more still to go. He'd won the FA Cup in 1979 and the League Cup in 1987; he added a long coveted league title in 1989 and another in 1991, and the FA Cup and League Cup once again each as a double in 1993. He'd passed the 400 appearance mark aged just 26, and been nominated for the Ballon d'Or at 22. 

At centre-back O'Leary was a fast-moving tower who idolised Franz Beckenbauer. "My uncle Paddy told me that if I could make just one run upfield per game, I would be completely different from other defenders," and as the 1970s became the 1980s and long-ball football ruled the First Division that was true. Arsenal were fortunate that O'Leary's pace and ball control were at home in the middle of a flat-back four, or sweeping up while the full-backs moved into midfield, or as a six-foot-one full-back himself. 

The Gunners were blessed, too, by O'Leary's incredible consistency. From his debut aged seventeen and three months in 1975, until his final match just after his 35th birthday in 1993, only his last season included fewer than 25 league and cup games. He played more than forty games eleven times, and more than fifty six times. He still holds Arsenal's record, of 722 appearances, the last of them from the bench as Arsenal beat Sheffield Wednesday in an FA Cup final replay. His last act, as an Arsenal player, was bringing the cup down the steps from the Royal Box.

"I never intended to play on past my 35th birthday," he said that summer, "but the idea of marking up twenty years with Arsenal grew and grew in my mind until it became an obsession." He was obsessed, too, with the institution at Highbury. "I grew up with the idea of Arsenal being one of the greatest clubs in the world, and they won the Double two years before they took me on," he said. "It's the club, rather than the people connected with it, that has always influenced my decisions."