How Alejandro Garnacho's Manchester United career started under a tent in Salford

Alejandro Garnacho performs with the zeal of a rock star every other week in front of 70,000 adoring supporters at Old Trafford. His introduction to Manchester United did not even attract one man and his dog.

Garnacho was 16 when he relocated from Madrid to Manchester with his family in September 2020. The Covid-19 curve was on the rise again and Garnacho had to quarantine for a mandatory two weeks.

He was bombarded with video calls from United staff he had never met, all of them conducted through a translator due to his limited English. Training sessions in his garden were recorded and overseen remotely by a coach.

The United academy had decamped to Littleton Road in Salford to protect the first-team bubble at Carrington. Littleton Road is not as storied as The Cliff but Brian Kidd used to lead Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Ryan Giggs on jogs around the Salford playing fields in the Nineties.

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Indoor training was not permitted, so Garnacho arrived to the sight of a marquee on a vast Salford pitch. "So Alejandro’s Manchester United career started under a tent in Salford," the academy head Nick Cox laughs.

"Two weeks’ worth of quarantine. Strange people trying to bombard him with video calls, telling him you’ve got to learn English, you’ve got to get fit, we have to introduce you to all these people, all this stuff.

"Then he rocks up, [training for] 75 minutes. The protocols then were crazy. We had a form presented to us for every training session about the dimensions and the number of players and whether that constituted close contact, the science that went into preparing training