Youth football historians Tony Park and Steve Hobin uncovered this remarkable statistic, while writing the book Sons of United, and Inside United spoke to Tony recently to find out more...

How did you uncover the statistic around the Fulham game in October 1937, which is when the run of homegrown players in the first-team squad began?

While we were writing the book, we kept uncovering statistics like, for example, in 1957, 10 players from the youth system played in a first-team game and the 11th, Colin Webster, came to us at 18 so isn’t officially credited as a youth player. I started looking back game-by-game through each season, and worked out that, hang on, we’ve had a youth player in every single game here. I went back as far as I could go and then realised that the game before Fulham, which was against Sheffield Wednesday, there wasn’t a player that hadn’t come through our youth system. Tom Manley and Jackie Wassell at the time were the two players who had first come through our youth system, so when they were missing from that line-up, I knew the run started with that Fulham game.