Mainoo was born in Stockport to Ghanaian parents, which means that he always had the option of playing for either the Three Lions or the Black Stars. But his journey to being called up to the England national team at the tender age of 18 is a very interesting one.
After playing for local club Cheadle & Gatley for a little while, Kobbie was scooped up by Manchester United at the age of nine in 2014. The boy worked hard in the Manchester United academy, and his time finally came in 2022. That year, he helped the Manchester United under-18s win the FA Youth Cup.
But anybody who watched him back then just instantly knew that he wouldn’t be with the youth team for much longer.
The first time Kobbie ever sat on a bench for a Premier League game was in October 2022, in the game against Newcastle. But he didn’t make his senior debut until three months later, when he started against Charlton Athletic in the EFL Cup in January 2023. Then his Premier League debut came the following month, when he came off the bench against Leicester. Those two months signaled the start of something beautiful, both for Manchester United and England.
At the end of that season, he joined the first team on the preseason tour. Now, we wish we could say that it was happy ever after from here, but it wasn’t. Only just 18 now, Mainoo picked up an ankle injury in July 2023, which forced him to be sidelined at the start of the 2023–24 season.
It’s always a horror when a youngster picks up an injury; no one knows how badly it could affect their careers. Look at Pedri, Ansu Fati, and even Alexander Pato. Fingers were being crossed in Carrington, hoping that Mainoo actually gets to reach his full potential.
Anyway, the boy finally recovered from his injury in October, and the coach deemed him ready, so on November 26, 2023, Mainoo started his first ever Premier League game for Manchester United against Everton.
Guess what! He was named Man of the Match after that game.
His performance against Everton was so good that, just three days later, he was given his European debut, coming off the bench in the Champions League game against Galatasaray. He played just 32 minutes, but he finished with a 100% passing accuracy, a 100% dribble success rate, and a 100% duel winning accuracy.
To make your European debut at Galatasaray’s stadium as an 18-year-old and still give a good account of yourself is nothing short of spectacular. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Kobbie Mainoo started the new year rather well, scoring his first senior team goal in January 2024 in an FA Cup game against Newport County. So just four days after that goal, Mainoo scored his first ever Premier League goal.
Now listen, your first Premier League goal will always be special, especially when it comes to playing for your boyhood club at the age of 18. But the goal Mainoo scored against the Wolves was extra special for so many reasons. First of all, it was a very beautiful goal, one that even the biggest legends of the game will be proud of. And then, in the 97th minute of the game, it came to give Manchester United a very important win.
To cap it all off, that goal earned Mainoo his first major senior individual award, the February 2024 Premier League Goal of the Month. That was the goal that really announced him to the world. This was not just any other kid; he is a special breed.
From that moment on, everybody started to talk about Kobbie Mainoo. Man United fans started calling for him to play more games, while the English media and England legends like Rio Ferdinand and Ian Wright were asking for him to be called up to the senior national team and even go to the Euros.
And even though Gareth Southgate didn’t have him in his initial squad for the March international break, the kid’s performance in Manchester United’s FA Cup quarter-final victory against Liverpool seemed to convince him, so he called him up and gave him his debut in Wembley against Brazil. This meant that Mainoo skipped the under-20s and under-21s completely and went straight to the senior team, something we rarely see in England.
Mainoo started his first game for England against Belgium, played 75 minutes, and was named England’s Man of the Match. Do you know how incredible it is to be named man of the match in your first start for your country at the age of 18—especially in the midst of England's most talented crop of players ever?
Unsurprisingly, many former Manchester United players began to liken Kobbie Mainoo to some older players and legends of the game. Rio Ferdinand likened him to Clarence Seedorf because, while Mainoo is a tough central midfielder who is great at winning the ball from opponents, he is also very technical with the ball at his feet and can maneuver out of the tightest of spaces, just like Seedorf. And in fact, when you just look at the way both players are built, you'll already see similarities.
Dimitar Berbatov and Louis Saha said the kid reminds them of another Manchester United academy product, Paul Scholes, and you can see why they said so. Just like Scholes, Kobbie can play anywhere in the midfield. He can put in a good tackle in defensive midfield, he can play in a good pass from the center of the midfield, and he can also score goals as an attacking midfielder. That’s Scholes right there.
Saha even went further to say that Kobbie felt like a mix of Xavi and Busquets, and it’s also for the same reasons we just mentioned. Yes, he’s still young, and there’s a lot of growing up he has to do, but you can see Mainoo doing well as a deep-lying playmaker who can dictate the tempo of the game at the heart of midfield.
He can play brilliant passes like Xavi and wiggle out of tight spaces like Busquets.
But we all need to be careful not to heap so much pressure on the kid just yet. Yes, the football world is very excited about this new talent, but he’s still just a kid, and he needs to be given time to grow. We saw fans compare him to another Carrington product with a 10-second clip from the game against Wigan, and while he looked like a much better player than Scott McTominay from that sequence, we should all remember that, at one point, McTominay was the shiny new thing from the academy just like Mainoo is now.
And we could say the same thing for Adnan Januzaj, Paul Pogba, and even Marcus Rashford. These guys came from the Manchester United academy; everybody got excited about them and swore they would save the club, but when the pressure became too much, the players broke, and the fans turned on them.
Hopefully that doesn’t happen to Mainoo; England, Manchester United, and the entire world of football need him to reach the very top of his game.