There are two avenues for a young player to make it into the first team, coming straight through the ranks like we saw with Scott McTominay or getting some experience on loan like Andreas Pereira has. He’s returned as a first-team player after a couple of loan spells, how pleased are you to see that and what can younger players in the Academy take from the likes of him and Scott?

The young players in this club, in spite of people [externally] trying not to speak too much about it [that we bring young players through], just in the first match of the season against Leicester, Manchester United had on the pitch more Academy players with more minutes than some other phenomenal teams in the Premier League that buy everything but nothing comes from the foundations. Money buys and they buy. We had, on the pitch, Andreas Pereira, [Paul] Pogba, [Marcus] Rashford and Scott. [Jesse] Lingard was not selected because he’d only just got back, but he will be. And nowadays, with the way football is, I think it’s a fantastic thing and I like that feeling in the team. I like that connection. We try to do it. I don’t think it’s possible every season but we try to do what Mr van Gaal did in his last year with Rashford and then the next season appeared Scott McTominay and now we brought Andreas back. I think it’s an area where we have to try to improve because we want to keep Manchester United at that level. We also need to improve our scouting system and our loan system and we need to have players ready to be back, like it happened with Andreas, and it looks like he has come back to stay.

Do you feel like the improvement of players is often overlooked? People just want more and more players but don’t always see what we have and how those players have improved, just like Andreas has?

Yes. I think, with Andreas, it was a good process for him. If he stayed here last season probably what is happening now to him could probably happen one season ago. But the decision to have one more loan was not a bad decision, especially from a human point of view. By the football point of view, he could probably even have had a better evolution here than he had at Valencia. Why? Because at Valencia he was playing right-winger, left-winger, right-midfielder, left-midfielder, so I think to be what he is, which is a no.6 or a no.8, is much, much better with the specific work he has here. But by the human point of view and I also read a few quotes from some interviews he gave. I see he has become more of a man. He goes to a different country on his own, no family, no friends, learns a new language, a new lifestyle, a new culture of football… it was a complex and complete process for him. It was different to the one McTominay and Rashford had but we, as a club, are really happy that in each of the past three years, we managed to get one player to come in [to the first team] and to stay. There are some clubs who give the debuts to players but then the players disappear and nobody knows where he is. He might be in the stats but where is he?! Nobody knows. With these three boys – Marcus, Scott and Andreas, they are first-team players, they are not numbers, they are options, they are players that are here to play. That is fantastic for us because we managed to do it in every season.