Special report: How Paul Pogba and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer have re-energised Manchester United Coaches and former teammates reveal how United’s uptick in form is directly linked to special bond between new manager and star player

Sixteen-year-old Paul Pogba emerges from Carrington’s Under-18 changing room for the first time and looks across to his new team-mates. He is tall — already six-foot-three — and gangly, and on his shoulders clings an even bigger reputation.

Already on the training pitch are Ravel Morrison, who everyone talks about, the highly-highly-rated Keane twins — Michael and Will — and the surprisingly small but skilful Jesse Lingard. They are part of a supremely talented pool of players and Pogba, spotted at Le Havre by Manchester United’s man in France, David Friio, and convinced to sign by director of football Jim Ryan, has been thrown in to see if he’ll sink or swim.

Just that morning, over breakfast, Under-18 manager Paul McGuinness turned to his coaches and said: “We’ll see how good this kid is.” And here he is: bouncing across to them in that typical lumbering stride that he still uses today.

They pass him a football. “If he’s that tall you’re not expecting him to have unbelievable skill, you think a big lad might be more physical,” McGuinness tells i. “Then he joins in and has feet like Andrés Iniesta.”

Loosening the knots

When United announced Pogba’s re-arrival in August 2016, with a Stormzy collaboration and the #pogback hashtag, they could’ve had no idea it would take two-and-a-half years and an entirely new manager to finally starting seeing a proper return on their investment, and for the player they had sold to Juventus four years earlier to emerge.

Yet since Ole Gunnar Solskjaer took over, the Pogba United’s coaches all saw as a teenager has clambered out of the skin of the 25-year-old Pogba. Jose Mourinho had tied up and locked away this free-spirited, creative Pogba and the first thing Solskjaer did when he arrived back in December was find the key and loosen the knots. Ten games, eight goals, three assists, in an unbeaten run and a drive back up the table that has forced Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola to consider their rivals outsiders for the Premier League title.

The two figures central to this were at very different stages in their lives when Pogba first arrived in Manchester, yet in equally formative years in the current steps of each career. When Solskjaer, asked as Molde’s manager last August about Pogba’s plight under Mourinho, said he would build a team around the midfielder were he in charge, part of that was based on working with the Frenchman in his few years as manager of United’s reserve team, and out training everyday on the same pitches. “Ole was on the field coaching him,” McGuinness says. “Anybody watching him would think this was a possible future star, the skills and the size, and it’s turned out that way. There’s no doubt Ole is the best guy to get it out of him now.”

Creativity is contagious

On Mondays — when the youth coaches used to mix age groups and a young Marcus Rashford would often join his current-day team-mates Pogba and Lingard in training — and Tuesdays the players would have double sessions, so on a Wednesday, when the coaches thought the lads needed a break, they would head indoors and take over the basketball courts in the gym, turn over some benches and play smaller-sided skill games. Word spread of Pogba, Morrison, Lingard et al trying to outdo each other, and people used to queue along the overlooking balcony to watch. “They say creativity is contagious and it is,” McGuinness says. “One does it, they all try it and then try to outdo the other. You’d pay for that. You see it come out now. We didn’t give that to Paul, he had it from France, but the environment certainly helped it to come out.

“It was so competitive so Paul wasn’t always best in training every day. But if someone did something good, he’d want to show he could do better. If he lost the ball he was like a bull trying to get it back.”

They would also play similar skill-based cage matches outside, cultivating a street football culture in one of the world’s most developed and sophisticated training centres, encouraged by McGuinness, who in his 11 years at United oversaw 86 academy players making the first team and 23 of those becoming full internationals and is now National Coach Developer for the Football Association.

“Paul’s had a lot of criticism, but people have concentrated on the things he can’t do. People expect, because he is so tall, a Patrick Vieira, but really he’s playing in the position Iniesta plays. Nobody complains about Iniesta’s defending! Paul has the same feet, he can get in the box, head goals.

“Paul was brilliant with the younger players, when they played in the cage they all looked up to him and wanted to be on his team, he was like the Pied Piper: they all wanted to copy his skills. He was like a big brother playing with the younger ones. Jesse was the same, joking with them, play fighting, we really tried to cultivate that playful atmosphere to encourage them to experiment and try things, just like street football.

“What you see now is what you get from cage football: players on the same wavelength, connecting, timing changes of rhythm, flowing moves and changes of direction, adapting to each other, absorbed, lost in the movement and in love with the ‘Spirit of Football’.”

Scribbling away

Solskjaer, meanwhile, was taking note. Literally. He was known for it. Even as a player, he would jot things down: in games, sitting in the dugout, during training session. Always making observations, forming ideas, scribbling. Soaking up Sir Alex Ferguson. Plotting an advantage he could steal from defenders should he come on to score, as he so consistently did.

In the two seasons, from 2009 to 2011, when Pogba won the league and cup with McGuinness’s Under-18s, like his peers he would dip in and out of Solskjaer’s reserves, co-managed with Warren Joyce, but after Christmas of the second year Pogba was mostly with them.

“You couldn’t hold him back,” McGuinness says. “He had to go to the reserves, he was too good for the 18s, too big, too strong and powerful. With the 18s we’d focus on the skill side and with the reserves Warren would work on the physical and tactical side. At that age he was ready for the physical work. With Ole and Warren they won the league.”

Why Fergie didn’t trust him

There are, however, mixed reviews of Pogba’s performances during that period. When former United midfielder Darren Fletcher was out with ulcerative colitis he had a spell coaching with the reserve team. “It included Pogba, Lingard, Morrison and we played Pogba higher up the pitch in attacking areas,” Fletcher says.

“We felt like he was the one who would win us the game, coupled with the fact he was ill-disciplined in the middle of the park. It goes back to a famous first-team game when we felt like he left off the back of, against Blackburn. Paul was on the bench and the boss picked Park Ji-Sung and Phil Jones in midfield. We didn’t think he was disciplined enough for the reserve team never mind the first team at that time.”

Manchester United youth historian Tony Park, co-author of Sons of United, watched every junior and reserve game during that period. “Pogba would have one great game, one average game and one anonymous game,” Park, 56, says. “It was why Fergie didn’t trust him. When he arrived there were 10 to 15 new players around the scene at the time, all with bigger reputations. Ravel Morrison was by far the standout and coaches were giving him lots of attention. Pogba’s ability was not in doubt, it was his inconsistency, that’s been an issue all his career.”

McGuiness adds: “He played central midfield but sometimes drifted out to the left. But he was a young player and always expressing his skills. That was part of the process.”

Happy-go-lucky

Off the pitch, around the place, Pogba was happy-go-lucky, always dancing in the dressing room or joking with a team-mate, much like he is now. One staff member at Carrington during that period, who asked to remain anonymous, told i that Pogba would eat many of his meals in the canteen with the academy staff and became incredibly popular. Solskjaer was analysing everything, and he liked the Pogba package.

“His thought processes underpinned his skills,” Ferguson wrote of Solskjaer in his 2013 autobiography. “He had that analytical mind. As soon as he arrived in a shooting position, he had it all sized up. He had mental pictures everywhere.

“By the time he came on he had analysed who the opponents were, what positions they were assuming. He had those images all worked out. The game was laid out for him like a diagram and he knew where to go and when. Ole was a sweet-natured boy who was never looking to be confrontational with me. There was no risk to my office door from Ole wanting to smash it down to demand a place in the first XI.”

Park also points out how Solskjaer “got on with everyone” and that less abrasive personality has helped coax the best out of Pogba, who was repeatedly pulled apart and pummelled, often in public, by Mourinho.

Rekindling the Fergie ‘feeling’

While Solskjaer’s recruitment skills could be tested should he be given the United job permanently — Mame Biram Diouf was recommended to Ferguson by Solskjaer through his Molde contacts and though the Norwegian and a club official travelled over to secure a €4m deal, it did not work out — he is rekindling the culture of Ferguson which had been lost by a succession of unsuccessful managers since the Scot left.

“Of all the players who came from outside he is the one who most understood and took on board the Manchester United ‘feeling’,” McGuinness says. “The feeling for the club, the family atmosphere, the way of playing, being positive, the idea of the team, teamwork — he was often a sub who came on — total understanding of the fans. He’s the one who studied it the most.

“His social intelligence is fantastic. He studied Sir Alex Ferguson closely.”

Mike Phelan, Ferguson’s No 2 for five years, has returned as assistant manager. Michael Carrick, 12 years a United player, is on the coaching staff. Former reserve team coach Mark Dempsey also returned. “There are people around the club who know about Manchester United under Ferguson,” McGuinness adds. “You look at the last few years, that’s an essential ingredient Sir Alex had — that Manchester United sense. It’s not so easy to know about Manchester United unless you were there when Fergie was there.”

Pogba will have a bit of that in him too — and Solskjaer is showing exactly how to draw it from him.