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Your support makes all the difference.Judged just from the numbers on their backs, the four teenagers Manchester City employed in the destruction of Aston Villa were fringe players. They totalled 277.
Kalechi Iheanacho, Besant Celina, Cameron Humphreys and Esmoris Tasende are the first visible products of a youth development programme that features equally giddying numbers. The Etihad Campus where they work and train alone costs £200m.
On Saturday, Iheanacho, the boy from the Nigerian oilfields who wore 72 on his back, grabbed the limelight with a hat-trick that featured by turns, power, strength and an immense coolness in front of goal. When he returned to the dressing room, his team-mates lined up and sang his name.
The other three were substitutes, brought on when any trace of resistance from an Aston Villa side captained by one of Manchester City’s finest graduates, Micah Richards, had vanished.
Nevertheless, Humphreys has faced a Real Madrid attack of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale. Yes, it was a friendly but it was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of 99,000. Humphreys wore 80 on his back and collected Bale’s shirt as a souvenir for good measure.
Tasende, a young Spanish left back, who already has a Manchester inflection in his voice, was sent to play for their sister club, New York City, where his education involved training with Frank Lampard, Andrea Pirlo and David Villa. Tasende said he learnt most from Andoni Iraola, less famous maybe, but good enough to play 500 times for Athletic Bilbao at right back.
Iheanacho is the jewel. His manager, Manuel Pellegrini, said he resisted the temptation to loan him because he would learn more training every day with Sergio Aguero.
He was the star of Nigeria’s triumphant progress in the Under-17 World Cup that was staged, perhaps coincidentally, in the United Arab Emirates.
There was a scramble for his signature and it came down to a straight choice between Porto and Manchester City. Kalechi preferred Portugal on the grounds he would play first-team football sooner. His father told him to go Manchester, a city where United once dominated youth recruitment.
Paul Scholes has long warned his former club they were losing the battle for youth. As if to underline his point, City’s under-14s won their Manchester derby 9-0 in September. Former players such as Robin van Persie, Darren Fletcher and Phil Neville have signed up their kids for City’s not United’s youth programmes.
City have recruited aggressively, with some at Old Trafford muttering that they offer more than just a generous mileage allowance. But two factors appear to be key – the 6,000 seat arena in which they play and the guarantee of an education at one of Manchester’s leading public schools, St Bede’s College.
There are many reasons why Louis van Gaal has clung on at Manchester United but one of the most significant has been his work with the club’s young footballers at a time when it has been desperately needed.
Nevertheless for all the emphasis on youth, reality will bite for Iheanacho when he is left out for Aguero against Sunderland tomorrow. It is just as well, Pellegrini smiled, that the boy has “excessive confidence”.
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