Inside Utd's grand plans to make their academy envy of world football once more

Stephen Torpey is sitting in one of the plush meeting rooms inside the newly renovated main building at Carrington with plenty on the agenda.

There is the increasing hype around 15-year-old JJ Gabriel - a player he is reluctant to name during this interview - and his plan to transform Manchester United's academy into the best in the world.

There's praise for the job Darren Fletcher has done with the Under-18s, whether the 'game model' referenced by ownership will be replicated at every age group, and also plenty around winning versus development.

But before getting to all of that, there is an elephant in the room that is better to address before the rest of the chat takes hold.

Back in October 2025, minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who was on site at Carrington last week to take in some of the Under-18s' Premier League Cup semi-final versus Crystal Palace, made his feelings on the state of United's academy plain.

'The academy has really slipped at Manchester United,' Ratcliffe said on a podcast.

'But you need the academy to be producing talent all the time. It helps you financially. And you have to have a certain number of British players in your squad.'

Ratcliffe's comments left little room for ambiguity and went down particularly poorly with family members of players in the Under-18s and the Under-21s that Daily Mail Sport spoke to.

Torpey, the man tasked with putting United back on top after prominent academy roles at Manchester City and Brentford, had his own interpretation.

'You mentioned, obviously, Jim's view on certain things, but ultimately I think that was based on things like facilities and the way that the club itself… you know, you're sitting in this beautiful building right now and it's like decorating your home for me,' Torpey said.

'So you do one room and one of the other rooms you feel like maybe doesn't feel the same as the rest of the house.

'We've got to do the academy and there's a plan in place now for us to refurbish, regenerate, do a lot of work around the academy facilities as well, so those kind of comments I think are based around that because I think it makes it clear that you could say that the academy building isn't as advanced as where the first team is right now.'

Ratcliffe's comments would always put Torpey and other senior academy staff in a difficult position; it is one reason why interviews with those figures have been so scarce this season to those journalists who routinely attend academy games home and away.

But what is not disputed is that Torpey has arrived as head of academy to help transform United into the best footballing academy in world football.

'The brief for me, so to speak, is we want to be the best,' he said, and said with conviction too.

'We want to be the greatest academy around. We want to be the greatest football club in the world. That's not changed.

'I think Manchester United can say over the years, certainly in the UK, we've got the conveyor belt of talent, we've got the production line that would suggest we are up there with the greatest, and my remit is to make sure that we can all look in the mirror, hand on heart, and say that we feel we're really challenging for that status.

'My view really is that we've just got to think critically about what we do, we've got to innovate where we can, we've got to do this with the best possible people.'

Along with director of football Jason Wilcox and the newly appointed Darren Hughes as the head of academy football development and methodology, both formerly of Man City, Torpey is the man that is tasked with mapping out that journey to No 1 status.

This season alone United have seen first team debuts handed to Shea Lacey, Jack Fletcher, Tyler Fletcher, and Bendito Mantato, while 15-year-old Gabriel has frequently trained with the first team group.

United's Under-21s are second in Premier League 2 and in the quarter-finals of the Premier League International Cup while Fletcher and the Under-18s are still in the reckoning to win a domestic treble.

So a lack of talent is not the issue here. In fact, many of Torpey's challenges in extracting that talent for the United first team, or to sell for maximum value externally, are aspects of the modern world that weren't in play when he was a rising star as a player.

Many of these teenagers have thousands of followers on social media, are tracked day in day out, and the psychological pressure to deliver is immense.

Just hours after this chat with Torpey where he talks of his desire to keep a lid on academy hype, first team attacker Bryan Mbeumo appears on a French YouTube show waxing lyrical about the talent of Gabriel. The soundbites generate thousands upon thousands of views.

'That's the modern era,' Torpey said.

'The fact that the boys who play now in the Under-18s have never known a life without social media. That's not the world I grew up in when I was playing.

'We've got young people who, because of society, are craving clicks and craving followers... We have to embrace that a little bit, it's not necessarily something I'm comfortable with, but maybe we have to embrace that for the future, maybe create our own version of how we can give them that stimulus.

'We've got to look at it through that lens, we can't just look at it through 'all these boys are talented, so therefore, this is part and parcel'.'

'We have to ask ourselves why,' he adds. 'That's what I do a lot, I'm a big, critical thinker, and I ask why a lot to the staff. 'So, why do we do this? Why don't we do that? OK, why have we done that for two years, and why don't we do it now? Why did we use to do that, and we don't do it anymore?'

Scrutiny of young players is a pertinent topic this week and one that Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta himself addressed on Monday when subjected to multiple questions about 16-year-old Max Dowman, who scored against Everton and suddenly found himself in newspaper and TV debates about whether Thomas Tuchel should take him to the World Cup.

Similarly with the Under-18s, who are in action on Wednesday night at Old Trafford against Sunderland in the quarter-finals of the FA Youth Cup, many of the players are widely known by United supporters.

Gabriel in particular generates millions of views on a weekly basis with his goals and his skills, is a Nike athlete that the brand see as the future face of the Mercurial brand, and is a name that is being put to first team head coach Michael Carrick with increasing regularity. Kai Rooney, son of United legend Wayne, is another that generates a lot of hype.

'It's our job to protect these young people because they do play for Manchester United and they do wear the badge and they wear our tracksuits and shirts,' Torpey added.

'They are part of our club and we're really happy that that's the case. We've got to find the line where we don't become parents and we don't become the people that are looking after every single bit because that's not our duty.

'It's not for us to create robots here, it's for us to allow individuals to flourish the way they want to flourish and therefore express themselves in a way they want to express themselves.'

For half of this campaign there was a black cloud lingering over United's season, only parting temporarily when academy teams turned on the style.

Now there are multiple chances of silverware and a raft of first team debuts to reflect upon in a season of such upheaval on and off the pitch throughout multiple age groups.

Both the Under-18s and Under-21s have had temporary, or more permanent, coaching changes, while numerous players have oscillated between both age groups. Off pitch senior academy staff have been added along the way, too.

For a long time there was a feeling that winning was taking priority over player development or vice versa. Now the question being asked around Carrington is: why not both?

'We don't always want to be the oldest team,' Torpey said.

'We want to have the youth and the younger players challenging and challenging to play well.

'The way we play is important. We have to play exciting football, we have to have a dynamic way of playing the game; not sitting back and parking the bus. That kind of thing is not going to help us teach the next generation.

'But we do play to win. If we're in competitions and we're in the latter stages like we found ourselves recently, in quarter-finals, semi-finals and we're in certain places in the leagues, then we obviously have to conduct ourselves in a certain way. But not at a detrimental effect of developing talent.

'You know that's the No 1 principle here; we have to do it our way which matters more than a win because in the end people won't remember the win but they will remember the player that came out the other side of the win or the loss.

'Sometimes when you win you lose and sometimes when you lose you actually win. We know everybody knows that but we've got to be the people as academy leaders who don't get wrapped up in the emotion of that and the personal agendas and how it might look on the outside world and do the right thing. That's what this club's done for many, many years and we'll continue to do that.'

Carrick and his staff will be there on Wednesday night to watch the Under-18s try to punch their ticket into the semi-finals of the FA Youth Cup. Somewhere further afield Ratcliffe will get his own updates on how Fletcher's youngsters fare.

The foundations are still being laid by Torpey and his staff but there has been a noticeable shift at Carrington around the academy.

The excitement brought on by players like Gabriel, Chido Obi, Jim Thwaites and Rooney. The togetherness fostered by coaches like Carrick. The winning mentality emerging across major youth competitions.

Even Ratcliffe must now concede that the days of, in his view, slipped standards look to be over.