From The Sunday Times:
United are about to announce partnerships with three clubs in England and Wales — Walsall, Connah’s Quay and Newport — that will effectively extend their catchment area for young players to cover most of the country. A fourth British outfit, Livingston of the Scottish Premierleague, are also about to become a feeder club.
The four will add to United’s growing feeder network, which already includes arrangements with Royal Antwerp (Belgium), Oslo Ost (Norway), Parramatta Eagles (Australia), Shelbourne (Ireland) and Brommapojkarna (Sweden). On August 6 they will play a friendly against Sporting Lisbon to announce a partnership with the Portuguese club.
By the start of the season, Ferguson hopes there will be three further agreements in place, with Nantes (France), MVV Maastricht (Holland) and São Paulo of Brazil.
It represents a global drive at youth level that no club has attempted before. Today the quest to become bigger, better, richer, takes United to the Coliseum in Los Angeles, where they will play Club America of Mexico.
Tomorrow it could take the form of spotting a kid on the backstreets of a city in a far corner of the planet and placing him with one of their local feeder clubs. Such things are already happening.
Earlier in the year, the United manager got wind of Carlos Eduardo de Castro Lourenco, a 16-year-old Brazilian prodigy.
Now he is a United player and has been placed at São Paulo, where he will remain until he is 18, when the plan is to send him on to finishing school at Sporting Lisbon, where he can get used to European football.
United’s explosion of activity at youth level has seen them, in recent months, sign Markus Neumayr, a teenage German playmaker, from Eintracht Frankfurt, Jonathan Spector, a 16-year-old centre-back, from Chicago Sockers, and Floribert Ngalula, also 16, a Congolese prodigy developed by Anderlecht.
Already at Royal Antwerp they have placed Abdulrahman Hussain and Arthur Gomez, prospects from Qatar and Gambia, respectively. But Ferguson does not want United to lose their essential historical character as a club with English bones and Celtic flesh.
Regarding Livingston, Peter Kenyon, United’s chief executive, said: "Scotland has always been a great feeder for us. If you look at the number of Scottish players we’ve had at the club in our history it has been quite phenomenal and we have been looking at ways of re-establishing that tie so that we can get the top guys to come down here and play in England.
"We’ve got several relationships throughout Europe. Royal Antwerp has been the most successful and when we have sent players out there, and brought players in, particularly from outside Europe, to develop, it has worked incredibly well for the club.
"What we’re looking for with Livingston is a similar sort of success. They are well placed geographically (almost equidistant between Glasgow and Edinburgh) and have a strong catchment area."
The youngster who Ferguson regards as his club’s current best prospect, Darren Fletcher, was almost lost because of geography. Even before Fletcher made his debut for Scotland Under-16 as a 14-year-old, United were courting him but, given that he was still living and going to school in Dalkeith in Lothian, summer training camps at Carrington were all they could provide.
Rangers and Celtic, both little more than 40 miles away, offered regular coaching and only the fact that Fletcher — like the young Beckham — was United-daft, made him stick with the Old Trafford club.
Ferguson can send the next Fletcher to Livingston, just as the next Mark Hughes can be schooled at Newport and any new Edwards placed at Walsall.
Ferguson’s feeder clubs, on top of getting access to the country’s top young talent, can look forward to playing regular friendlies against United XIs and receiving first-team fringe players on loan.
It is even mooted that Newport will get as much as £100,000 from the Old Trafford coffers to improve facilities.
While United’s Under-19s have just won the FA Youth Cup, and their Under-17s are making strides under Filho, the club’s need to improve at school-age level was underlined by their performance last week in Portland in Nike’s Premier Cup.
In a competition that involved a total of 20 Under-15 teams drawn from all over the world, United’s side played games against teams from South Africa, Germany, Colombia and Japan — and lost the lot.