The England midfielder has been left with little choice but to depart the club he loves after falling down the pecking order under Ruben Amorim
Little more than a year ago, Kobbie Mainoo looked to be the present and future of both Manchester United and England. He had scored in the FA Cup final and helped take the Three Lions to the European Championship showpiece, starting throughout the knockout rounds. But now his future in both teams is in huge doubt.
Rather than preparing to play in big Premier League games or World Cup qualifiers in the coming weeks, Mainoo's best chance of starting a game right now is against fourth-tier side Grimsby Town in Wednesday's Carabao Cup tie. It is quite the fall from grace for a player who not long ago was being spoken about in the same way as Marc Guehi or Cole Palmer, but while his England team-mates' careers have reached new heights, his has plummeted.
A brand new club is needed to help Mainoo get back on track to the top, with a previously unthinkable exit from United now feeling both inevitable and advisable. The Red Devils, though, need to think very, very carefully about letting this ultra-talented gem slip through their fingers.
Getty/GOALBehind Bruno
Mainoo has not played a minute of football so far this season, and while it is early days and so much can still change, he is not exactly being given much encouragement by Ruben Amorim over his situation. The coach only started Mainoo twice in United’s five pre-season games, and when asked why he was using the 20-year-old so infrequently, Amorim explained that Mainoo "needs to improve the rhythm, the pace".
After Mainoo was overlooked again at Fulham on Sunday, Amorim explained that the academy product was competing with Bruno Fernandes for a place, which, in the context of Fernandes’ status within Amorim’s team, was the equivalent of telling a young Barcelona hopeful that they were competing with Lionel Messi.
Fernandes has barely missed a minute, much less a match, for United in his five years at the club, and three months ago Amorim pleaded with his captain to reject Al-Hilal’s advances, forgoing a potential £80 million ($107m) cash injection. In other words, Mainoo has almost no chance of usurping Fernandes in the starting XI.
His only hope is that the seemingly indestructible United skipper picks up a long-term injury or that Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha are sidelined for long periods, forcing Amorim to bring Fernandes forward and free up a space in the midfield.
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It should be no surprise, then, that Mainoo is considering his United future and is ready to leave the club with whom he grew up. He is too good a player and has achieved too much, even at the age of 20, to sit and wait for someone else to get injured so he can play regularly. A player of Mainoo's ability deserves a club and a coach that properly appreciate him and embrace him for his strengths.
Whilst United fans are unanimous in their belief that Mainoo must stay, the people who make the decisions within the club think differently. It emerged last January that United would be willing to sell Mainoo along with Alejandro Garnacho for the right fee, which made it clear that co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe saw the midfielder as a lucrative asset he was happy to sell rather than a player to build the team around.
Ratcliffe and the other executives have also shunned Mainoo, both by failing to agree a new contract with him and with their steadfast support for Amorim, who has been so reluctant to use thus far in his tenure. The Portuguese has played Mainoo in 28 of his 44 matches in charge, starting him in only 15. He failed to make the starting line up for any of United’s Europa League knockout matches last term, and was only turned to in stoppage time of the final, even after Mainoo’s brilliant goal had saved United’s skin against Lyon in the quarter-finals.
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Mainoo’s lack of minutes for his club has affected the other thing he holds dear, playing for England. The midfielder was fast-tracked into Gareth Southgate’s Euros squad last year after his incredible rise at United, bypassing the Under-21 team to become one of the most important players in the Three Lions' run to the final.
But it has been almost a year since Mainoo was even called-up to an England squad. Injuries kept him out of the Nations League games last October and November, while he was also injured for Thomas Tuchel’s first two games in charge in March. He was, however, available for the June fixtures against Andorra and Senegal, but was understandably overlooked by the German after playing so little for his club.
Jordan Henderson and Curtis Jones were picked ahead of Mainoo, and even though Tuchel’s logic is sometimes hard to understand, it is difficult to see him recalling the United outcast for September's qualifiers. In fact, unless Mainoo can get regular football over the next six months, he is bound to miss out on the World Cup next summer.
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Of course, leaving United would be difficult for Mainoo on a personal level. He grew up in Stockport, renowned for being Manchester City’s heartlands, and has spoken of "having to fight" as a United fan in the minority. When United beat City in the 2024 FA Cup final with the help of his goal, he confessed to "losing it" in the celebrations. But if Mainoo wants to get his career back on track and avoid drifting at such a crucial stage, he has been left with little choice.
For United, letting Mainoo leave presents many risks. First of all they would lose a top-level midfielder, blessed with technical ability they have not had since Paul Pogba or Michael Carrick graced the Theatre of Dreams. Mainoo’s ability to take the ball from defence and shepherd it through aggressive midfields into attack is a precious resource in the modern game. Casemiro doesn't possess the same ability, and nor does Manuel Ugarte, whose reckless passing and propensity to be robbed of the ball negates the benefits he brings with his tough-tackling and defensive awareness.
Brighton’s Carlos Baleba does have those skills in his locker, but he has been deemed too expensive for United to sign this summer. Baleba does admittedly have physical attributes which Mainoo lacks, but even so, it still beggars belief that United could be so careless with a player the majority of clubs would covet.