There were plenty of football achievements to celebrate, too. We took some time to recognise three senior debuts for the first team (graduates 249, 250 and 251), for Omari Forson, Ethan Wheatley and Toby Collyer. Ethan’s, in particular, is worthy of recognition not just because of the hard work gone into his journey from a young age at United, but because it was that landmark 250th. That’s incredible and we should never stop shouting about it.
We had a total of 15 Academy graduates feature in first-team matchday squads, with ten of those contributing minutes. In total, our graduates delivered an incredible 11,835 mins in our first team last season, 40% more than our next closest rivals.
We celebrated the achievements of some of these graduates in particular, from Alejandro Garnacho, Scott McTominay and Marcus Rashford hitting appearance landmarks (100, 250 and 400, respectively) to Alejandro and Kobbie Mainoo scoring in the FA Cup final and representing their countries in major international finals, too. They were both then nominated for the Golden Boy award, having been two of only three teenagers to play more than 2,500 minutes across Europe’s top five leagues. Alejandro’s bicycle kick against Everton was also worthy of the Puskas Award.
As well as Kobbie’s influence on England’s route to the EURO 2024 final, we were proud to see graduate Tom Heaton join the Three Lions camp. Later in the year, Angel Gomes made his senior debut for England. In terms of current Academy players, more than 40 of them received youth international call-ups during 2024.