Monday Morning Coffee: Who Can Teach MU to Fight?

29/12/2025 15:14:00 ScoreStream

When Shea Lacey started training with Manchester United’s youth team, his father was very concerned because he saw his son passing the ball too infrequently.

1. He worried that his son was going against the current trend: everywhere, players were being trained to pass, move according to tactics, and form structured units from an early age. Lacey, however, preferred to keep the ball and perform surprising, individualistic actions.

Lacey’s father feared that coaches would judge his son as too greedy until the Carrington academy coaches reassured him with the message that they would teach the boy “when it’s the right moment to pass.” They did not mind his greediness; they even wanted him to develop it to “overcome difficult situations.” “We will only begin teaching tactics when he turns 10.”

Shea Lacey was born in Liverpool but is now a major hope at Man United. After coming off the bench in the match against Aston Villa, he became the 256th player to progress from MU’s youth academy to make an official first-team appearance.

He is living proof of a proud Man United record: every season since 1937, the club has had at least one player trained in their academy play for the first team. Data shows that Carrington is the most efficient academy in England, based on the number of players trained and playing professionally: they have maintained 20% of Premier League playing time per season by academy members over the past 10 years (24% in 2024!).

More importantly, Lacey’s story reveals the essence of Carrington’s human development approach. The priority here is not tactics but personal decision-making.

2. Lacey debuted for the first team at a time when MU was still unsettled under coach Ruben Amorim, and one of the biggest questions was tactics: why does the Portuguese coach keep sticking with a three-defender formation?

The tactical issue became so obsessive that Henry Winter, a well-known British sports journalist, posted on social media platform X declaring that Amorim was too “stubborn,” and the three-defender system would only lead the team into a dead end.

Lacey is the 256th player promoted from Carrington to Man United’s first team in the club’s history. Photo: Getty

Recently, in an interview with the famous YouTube channel The Overlap, when asked what was special about Man United’s past tactics, former defender Patrice Evra frankly said: “MU had no tactics, exactly. It was just about individuals.”

What was different? “For nine years, Sir Alex always growled when I passed back. He wanted direct, breakthrough football but still safe at the back,” Evra continued. “Maybe in training, everything was very real. We treated each other like real enemies. Sometimes Sir Alex had to stop practice because he feared we’d break each other’s legs. It was like everyone on the team was a captain.”

This spirit sounds very out of place with what’s happening now: remember that MU once played so poorly that coach Amorim had to apologize to fans at least three times since taking charge because of the players’ attitude. Yet now, the main concern is how many defenders MU is playing with!

3. In Lacey’s story, besides being raised in Liverpool, another notable detail is that six years ago, he reached the semifinals of the national boxing championship at 36kg weight class.

The reason he lost the final (though Lacey never blamed it) was... a tooth. One day before the match, Lacey had a dentist appointment, and the doctor wanted to extract one of his teeth.

Lacey refused, but his mother disagreed. The tooth was badly decayed from candy, and as a result, Lacey was in so much pain after the extraction that he could barely speak.

The next day, Lacey hid from the doctor to enter the ring, fought hesitantly, and lost. But it was a defeat worth noting.

It’s unknown if Amorim knew these details before deciding to give Lacey his first-team debut. But the coach once said many MU players have a “sense of entitlement” so strong that they “sometimes forget what it means to play for MU.”

Yet if there’s another loss, people will still dissect the three-defender formation, forgetting that Carrington’s core spirit might only live in a young trainee, not the highest-paid stars in the squad.

Pham An

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