It was not uncommon, even recently, for one of Marcus Rashford’s family to pop their head around his bedroom door and find the Manchester United striker asleep on his bed, an open laptop flickering next to him with footage of the great and good of world football.

Rashford would often squirrel himself in his room, his mobile phone left downstairs, and immerse himself for hours in clips of Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Neymar and others on YouTube.

He would not watch Messi simply for the pleasure of it, though. Rashford was studying very specific actions that might have led to the Barcelona maestro scoring or creating a goal – the way he opened his body to receive the ball or deceive an opponent, for example, or why he made a particular run at a particular angle at a particular time. The thirst for information, for self-improvement was, and remains, insatiable.

Such vignettes will not surprise the coaches who have watched Rashford grow into one of the most explosive, exciting young forwards in Europe, a 22-year-old world beater in the making whom United can ill afford to be without against Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday.

A Champions League game might have been on the television and those coaches’ phones would invariably beep with a text message from Rashford hungrily dissecting a small detail or passage of play. It still happens now.