United Strike Balance Of Integrating Overseas Recruits

As we continue our look at Manchester United's Academy during the international break, we shift the focus to recruitment of overseas youngsters.

The Reds have enjoyed success in this area for a number of years and meshed local talent with some outstanding acquisitions from abroad. Andreas Pereira is the latest example to make the first team, scoring on his full debut against Ipswich Town recently and forcing his way into Louis van Gaal's plans.

At Under-21 level, Tim Fosu-Mensah is developing his game after arriving from Ajax and there are other recruits in the system, including Josh Doughty, who joined this year from Real Salt Lake City and 16-year-old Belgians Ilias Moutha-Sebtaoui and Indy Boonen, who were both on the bench for the Academy team at Everton last weekend. Joel Castro Pereira is currently on loan at Rochdale and, of course, Adnan Januzaj is with Borussia Dortmund.

In the past, players have come to the club at a young age and learned their trade and Academy coach Paul McGuinness explained the philosophy behind integrating the cream of teenage talent from across the globe into the existing framework.

"It’s always a mixture," McGuinness told ManUtd.com. "You need to get the best players. Gerard Pique, Giuseppe Rossi and the Da Silva twins from Brazil are all good players we signed from abroad. We have to be in the market and it’s a world market.

"They still come over at 16 and can be moulded into the United family. They are still youth-team players, still homegrown, and that’s very important. Bobby Charlton wasn’t from Manchester. Neither was George Best, Norman Whiteside nor Mark Hughes. But they are homegrown players who were brought over at the right age and grown up to become part of the Manchester United family.

"You can only get so many from local areas and you have to get English players because the other thing is English players want to stay here a long time. If you’re from Uruguay, Japan or wherever then you come for a time but are always going to head off home. It’s not the same but that’s not to say you shouldn’t have those players. You think in the past of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Jaap Stam and Patrice Evra, for instance, some of these top foreign players, and, because of the core of homegrown players here already, they attached themselves to that and became like homegrown players because they bought into it.

"If you don’t have the core of homegrown players, it’s all over the place because there is nothing to buy into and that’s why the work we do includes taking them to tournaments and making them feel part of the club. So, each year, we want another one or two to be added in to be part of the core of homegrown players so all the culture of the team is built. That’s our job, to get more into that core.

"Other teams do go down the route of buying lots of young players but that’s what makes us different. We have always had that core. At the moment, we’re trying to compete in the Premier League and Champions League and get the best players from all over the world but we’ve also got the philosophy of having a homegrown core and binding them to the club. They have got to be good enough, though, and we are having to look at recruitment all over the world so that they’re high class enough. If they’re not good enough, they are not going to be able to pass on the culture."

Credit: Manutd.com