Senne Lammens: Manchester United's Rising Star in Goal
Edwin van der Sar has seen it all at Old Trafford. Title races, rebuilds, goalkeepers who thrived and others who crumbled under the weight of the shirt. So when the Manchester United great pauses to praise a newcomer between the posts, people at the club tend to listen.
This time, the focus is on Senne Lammens.
The 23-year-old Belgian arrived last summer as a late-window signing from Royal Antwerp, a relatively low-key move at £18.1m that barely registered outside scouting circles. In Belgium, he was promising. In England, he was unknown. At United, he was stepping into chaos.
New manager. New ideas. A club still wrestling with its own identity. And a No 1 shirt that had already burned through reputations.
Lammens didn’t blink.
Thirty appearances into his first season in the 2025-26 campaign, six clean sheets on the board and, more importantly, a sense that the back line finally trusts the man behind it. Under Ruben Amorim, he has not just become Manchester United’s first-choice goalkeeper; he has become a stabilising force in a team that has spent years lurching from one reset to the next.
Andre Onana, once the marquee arrival, was sent out on loan in 2025. The door opened. Lammens walked through it and shut it behind him.
Van der Sar, speaking to Ben Foster on the Fozcast podcast, admitted he had only caught “a few games” of Lammens at Antwerp. The leap from the Belgian Pro League to Old Trafford, he knows, is brutal.
“To come to one of the best, the best league in the world, to a club that is in difficulty, United the last couple of years, it’s chop and change, managers, players, all kinds of things,” he said.
That is the context that matters. United have not been a gentle landing spot for goalkeepers. They have been a storm.
Yet Van der Sar sees something familiar in the way Lammens has handled it.
“I think he steadied the ship when he came in,” he said. “Made the saves that he needed to make, was brave coming out, played with his feet also, a calm, composed figure.”
That last phrase will ring in the ears of United fans. Calm. Composed. It is exactly what they once saw in Van der Sar himself when he arrived from Fulham in 2005, a veteran solution after years of searching for a true successor to Peter Schmeichel.
Back then, Van der Sar was 34, a proven winner with Ajax and Juventus, hardened by Champions League nights and the demands of elite dressing rooms. Lammens is a decade younger, still finding out what it means to live under the permanent glare of Old Trafford.
The Dutchman does not hand out comparisons lightly, yet he is willing to put their early United careers side by side.
“I think comparable, let’s say, to how I played, but I came there at 34,” he reflected. “So, in that way, he’s doing tremendously well.”
Coming from a man who lifted four Premier League titles, a Champions League and two League Cups with United before retiring in 2011, the endorsement carries real weight.
Lammens’ numbers this season are solid rather than spectacular on paper, but the story runs deeper than clean sheets. He has given Amorim a goalkeeper who can play out, who will take responsibility with the ball at his feet, who will come for crosses when the box is crowded and the pressure is on. When United have wobbled, his presence has not.
The fans have noticed. Lammens has already been voted Signing of the Season by supporters on TalkingPoints, a reflection of how quickly he has gone from curiosity to cornerstone.
United paid £18.1m for a keeper many outside Belgium had barely watched. The fee now looks like shrewd business, the kind of deal top clubs are supposed to find before the rest of Europe catches on.
The question no longer centres on who Senne Lammens is. It’s how far he can go as the man in goal for a club still desperate to climb back to the top.
