Devonte Redmond will never forget the day he found out he was no longer a Manchester United player.



He was on holiday. It was the summer of 2018, Jose Mourinho’s final year at the club, and Redmond had headed to the beach on the Greek island of Kos.



“I looked at my phone,” he tells The Athletic. “All of a sudden I’d got loads of notifications on Twitter. ‘All the best’ — lots of messages like that. It was really strange. But then I saw the reason why all these messages were being sent. There was a list of all the lads that United had let go. It had been posted on Twitter and it was the official ‘retained and released’ list. And that was how I found out.”



How do you even begin to understand the shattering effects that had on a young footballer who had known virtually nothing but the United system?



Redmond was eight when he joined United’s junior ranks. He stayed with the club...