The secrets behind the incredible rise of Man Utd sensation Kobbie Mainoo
Kobbie Mainoo’s first Premier League goal was special by any metric. He picked the ball up seemingly with nowhere to go, 30 yards from goal, sashayed past three defenders before curling a sumptuous 97th-minute winner into the net. It earned Manchester United a potentially season-defining victory.
Then you remember that United is his club. He has come up through the academy, through the age-group teams and now mixing with multimillion-pound superstars. So you’d think that having floated back down from cloud nine on that February day against Wolverhampton Wanderers, the enormity of what he had just done would have hit him in the dressing room.
Not Mainoo – it was all in a day’s work for the most exciting academy graduate to come through the United ranks since the Class of ’92.
“He is just sat in there, packing his stuff away like nothing has happened. I can’t believe it,” one United staff member told i after Mainoo’s stunning strike at Wolves at the start of February – a goal of the month contender.
When United slumped to another meek defeat at Nottingham Forest in December, supporters piled in on Erik ten Hag’s decision to take Mainoo off at half-time. It was the 18-year-old’s eighth senior start. He had already made himself indispensable.
The ability to seamlessly take to any occasion like a duck to water is, according to those who have played a huge part in the Stockport-born starlet’s rise, one of the main reasons why sensational goals like the one against Wolves are just another step on the journey to stardom.
“Challenging him was the hardest thing,” Steve Vare, Mainoo’s first coach at Cheadle and Gatley Junior Football Club, tells i.
“Even at that age he was clearly the best player. We would just push him onto the older age group matches straightaway. We would put a curtain across the sports hall and put all the other better players on the opposing team, just to make up for Kobbie.
“I’d set him rules, like he was only allowed to score with his left foot, or even you cannot score at all, only set up team-mates. I had to tell him I couldn’t give him the player of the match every week.
“Before we got into games, we would do a little warm-up session, where we would roll the ball into a kid to shoot for goal, but that was too easy for Kobbie so we would chip or bounce it into him. He would just take it all in his stride.
“It got to a point where his dad, Felix, a really nice, quiet guy, came up to me and asked how we could challenge him further. We tried to get him into the Under-7s and 8s, but they were fully subscribed.”
His father, Felix, then scoured Greater Manchester for a club good enough to at least test a young Mainoo – Failsworth Dynamos.
“We had a good team and were winning the league,” Ian Kelly, his former coach, tells i. “One match at Curzon Ashton, this guy came up to me and asked if his son could come training with us.
“I had too many players already. But he came training, against players a year older and he did really well. Of course I took him on.
“There were others almost as good as Kobbie in terms of talent at that age – many who went to City’s academy – I see them in the pub now! You could tell Kobbie was different, though. He was just desperate to play football, no messing about or rowdy like the others.”
Scouts from both Manchester City and United would be watching Failsworth, birthplace of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, every week. There were offers from both, but for Felix and his son there was only ever one option.
“He was training with both academies when he played for us. He ended up picking United, annoyingly,” Kelly, a City fan, adds.
“His dad phoned me the other day, saying he wanted to sponsor Dynamos and another team my grandson plays for. Kobbie wanted to do something. Kobbie also phoned us after he had signed his professional contract at United thanking us for what we had done for him, saying he would never forget us.”
This heartwarming theme, from everyone you speak to around Mainoo’s burgeoning talent, crops up time and again. One of a humble, down-to-earth kid with a great family support system in place.
“I first came across him when I went with a group of Under-12s to Boston on a pre-season tour,” United’s academy director Nick Cox tells i. “We like to take the boys to these places to get them life experience as well as football experience. We did all the cultural stuff, then played in the tournament and won it.
“It would be really easy to say he was the best player in that tournament, but it doesn’t work like that at Manchester United. What you do at events like these is expose these players to different experiences to see if you prediction about their potential talent is true or not.
“You could see that Kobbie was a really calm kid no matter what environment. He is a delightful young man, he never stepped out of line, but played with a cheeky grin on his face. Of course you have to have the ability – with the spotlight we have on us, I believe Manchester United is the hardest environment to thrive, in the hardest league. But more importantly, you have to have the psychological qualities, you have to be brave, calm, resilient and cope with the pressure and he has got all of that.
“He is humble off it, but on the pitch he has the belief to express himself in his own unique way. That is the mark of any great United player. He isn’t there yet, he is at the beginning of his journey, but we are very proud of him. He is fully aware he has much still to do.”
Such is the furore around Mainoo, United have almost given up trying to keep a lid on his abilities. Team-mates have been speaking glowingly about him, while the player himself has been thrust into in-house media duties with regularity of late – something else Mainoo seems to excel at.
His coaches at England youth level were not so willing to eulogise. The FA’s next task is to persuade Mainoo to pick England over Ghana – Felix’s homeland.
Having starred in front of over 60,000, a crowd that included first coach Vare, as United, thanks to two goals from Alejandro Garnacho, won the FA Youth Cup in 2022, Mainoo was named Jimmy Murphy Young Player of the Year for 2022-23. Previous winners include Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho.
It is still some jump from youth star to first name on the team-sheet for a Manchester derby. Trust was needed and soon enough Mainoo had earned his right to be among the big time.
“The beauty of Kobbie though is he has a lovely network around him, in terms of his brothers [one a former Love Island contestant] and sisters, his parents and his wider network at friends. They are a nurturing family who kept him grounded and centred,” Cox adds. “He never gets carried away with his ability.
“We would map out each week to push him. Then in Christmas 2022, during the World Cup, we went to Cadiz with the first team. When we returned from that, he was training with the first team each week. The most important thing was the other senior players saw he could cope at senior level.”
Cope is putting it mildly. Ten Hag was ready to make Mainoo a key figure at the start of this campaign after impressing on pre-season tour, only for an injury suffered against Real Madrid to derail the teenager’s ascension.
Such was the faith Ten Hag was ready to place in Mainoo, he even later suggested the club’s poor start to the season might have been different had the starlet been fit from the off.
He has already dominated proceedings at Anfield. Now comes a greater challenge – stopping City at a time of the season when they are at their most unrelenting.
Up against arguably the best holding midfielder in the world in Rodri on Sunday, Mainoo won’t be asked to hold back, as Vare used to. Nobody, however, will be prouder than Vare should he pass his latest challenge with the ease he has shown since he set foot in a Cheadle Hulme sports hall.
“He was a really nice lad, used to take instructions, which considering he was so much better than everyone else was always nice to see,” Vare adds.
“One of the most pleasing things for us is that it is Kobbie who came out and said ‘my first club was Cheadle and Gatley’. He could have just said United from the start. We have not gone out of our way to make us Kobbie’s first club.
“It would be nice for him to come back and see us, but it would not be for any other reason than just to shake his hand.”
