Interview: Marcus Rashford on his journey through the Man Utd Academy

When you’re part of the Academy, what did you learn more from – the day-to-day training or playing the actual matches?

“For me, day-to-day training. It’s tough, especially in the Academy – the best players that you come up against are the ones in training. Unless you’re venturing out to play against teams like Chelsea, who you don’t face as regularly. So training was always one of my biggest challenges. We had some good players in our team and training was always intense and of a high quality. So if we just kept doing the right things in training, even if the weekend came and we lost or we didn’t play as well as we wanted to, we were always developing as a team. And I think you can see now, my age group and [those born in] 1996 – the year above – there’s a lot of players that are playing league football. The lads deserved it.”

If you could give some advice to a young player joining the Academy now, what would you say to them?

“I think just enjoy the journey. Don’t get caught up in football, football, football, especially at a young age. You have to enjoy training, enjoy the games and enjoy things that have to come with it. You definitely miss out on things as a kid, but for me I just completely flipped it and turned it all into a positive. I saw it as a new experience: even though I wasn’t seeing friends, I was meeting new people every day. New school, new home, different environment. These are little things that if I didn’t choose this path, maybe all I would have known is my friends all the time, and I wouldn’t have been as open to these different things.”