No matter what happens this season, it can be considered another success for the Manchester United academy set-up.
While results on the pitch at first-team level will always dictate the overall mood around the club, the work being done at youth level is about so much more than which team wins at the weekend.
United's main focus is on developing players and ensuring as many as possible can make it in the professional game, whether that be at United or anywhere else in the world.
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Academy product Marcus Rashford has arguably been the best player in the Premier League this season, while Erik ten Hag's senior side is studded with many other home-grown talents, from the likes of Scott McTominay and Tom Heaton, to the next generation of Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo.
United's real success though is that if you tune into any Football League match over the weekend, you will most likely find a connection to Carrington and a player who has once represented the club at youth level.
That is the driving focus going forward, something academy director Nick Cox knows all too well about.
“Ultimately we are preparing them for life, hopefully, in the most competitive league in the world where they are going to be expected to win,” he told club media. “The [key] driver for the academy and for our staff is individual development.
“In order to promote individual development, you actually have to stretch the players and sometimes put them in a difficult environment. So what we do with the Under-21s is keep the average age really low. For the first half of the season the average age of our Under-21s was 19 so we were regularly coming up against teams that were a year to a year-and-a-half older.
“We could see the development and we could see the returns that the boys were getting from finding it really tough. The season panned out exactly as we thought it would and [Under-21s boss Mark] Dempsey and his team of staff did an incredible job.
“We were really delighted to see the kind of progress people were making, and what’s happening now in the second part of the season is a lot of those boys who found it tough are now finding it comfortable.
“To see the amount of boys that are being really stretched and playing in some tough environments is exciting for us and fair play to the coaches – I make their life difficult. [But] that’s how you prepare footballers for the ultimate challenge which is to go on and make a debut.”
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