History will remember Scott McTominay well as a Manchester United player.
Not as a club legend, nor as someone who saw it all and won the lot, since he played during turbulent times under five managers across nine seasons, including the early stages of this one. That should prepare him well for his new club, Italy’s Napoli — life is seldom dull for the team who play in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
While he won no league titles, McTominay gave United fans significant moments of joy in his 255 appearances after Jose Mourinho gave him his Premier League debut in May 2017 as an 84th-minute substitute against Arsenal in a 2-0 away defeat. One of them was the last goal United supporters got to see in person before stadiums closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Scott has got the Man Utd DNA and it’s sad to see him go,” Mourinho’s successor as manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, told The Athletic. “It’s similar to when Jonny Evans and Danny Welbeck left. I’m sure he’ll go on to do great things and show both his football and personal qualities. He’s a top pro with a great attitude. He scores important goals for club and country while always wanting to learn and improve.”
Solskjaer picks out McTominay’s 96th-minute goal to seal a 2-0 home win against Manchester City in the final game before lockdown began in March 2020 as one of the highlights of his time managing United, aside from the memorable Champions League away wins against Paris Saint-Germain. “Scott always gives 100 per cent for the club and represents United in the best possible way, so that was wonderful for everyone,” he added.
Solskjaer also points to 6-2 and 5-1 defeats of Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United – two more of McTominay’s best games in red.
Yet Solskjaer had needed convincing. He didn’t start the Scotland international in a league game for two months after taking over in December 2018 before giving him a chance because of injuries to others. He took it.
Under Solskjaer, McTominay was encouraged to move further forward, to play a bit, to attack — the Norwegian always wanted a midfielder arriving in the box. By the time he took his team to Paris that March for the second leg of a Champions League last-16 tie, with PSG 2-0 up from the game at Old Trafford, McTominay started and played a pivotal role in a dramatic 3-1 win, United squeezing through on the now-scrapped away goals rule thanks to Marcus Rashford’s added-time penalty.
“That night was probably the best of my life — there was so much adrenaline,” McTominay said at the time. “The penalty, going to the away fans after to celebrate… we don’t just want more of that at this club, we need more of that. We’re going to work incredibly hard to make sure that we do.”
McTominay celebrates the win at PSG in March 2019 (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
In the next round, French newspaper L’Equipe rated him as the best player on the pitch as United were outclassed against Barcelona, losing 4-0 on aggregate. Team-mates Paul Pogba and Nemanja Matic helped him along on and off the pitch, with the latter telling him to keep his feet on the ground, to concentrate on football and not to be concerned about material things like cars.
There’s affection for the man that United fans serenaded to the tune of This Girl by the Kungs: ‘Der, der, der, Scott McTominay’. He was a homespun Lancastrian, driven and determined, yet there was no groundswell of protest that he should not be sold this summer. Rather, there was acceptance that it might be for the best for both parties.
United get a considerable fee of €30million (£25.7m/$33.4m) – the fourth-biggest sale in the history of the club behind Cristiano Ronaldo, Romelu Lukaku and Angel Di Maria, their highest for a British player and also for any homegrown player. He had less than a year left on his contract too and it’s surely better for United fans for him to go somewhere where he is less likely to show why he should be missed.
Fulham fans may have sung, “Scott McTominay, he’s one of our own” at Old Trafford recently in anticipation of him moving there but for a long time, the midfielder was linked with Newcastle United and, after the 1-0 defeat at St James’ Park last season, their then co-owner Amanda Staveley was seen greeting him with a very familiar “Scotty!”, which suggested that they’d met before.
The truth is that United need money and McTominay is one of the few players in the squad who could attract a healthy sale value, a point accentuated by teams being incentivised to sell homegrown players these days, which is odd given they should add emotional and not financial value to a club.
McTominay is 27 and in his prime, having just played a key role in helping Scotland qualify for this summer’s European Championship. He wants to be a starter wherever he plays; not coming off the bench, as he did for United in their first two games this season.
He knows his next contract was likely to be the biggest one of his United career and the club knew that, too. That meant he’d push hard to be closer to the wages of some of his better-paid but arguably less influential team-mates, yet his standing was made clear when Casemiro came in from Real Madrid: the Brazilian took over and raised the levels in the middle of the pitch, at least in that initial 2022-23 season.
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There are United players who the fans are glad to see the back of, failures despite their reputations, vast transfer fees and wages. McTominay is not one of them: he will be applauded if he returns with Napoli in a future European competition.
Mourinho took to McTominay and held him up as an example to others. A sceptical view was that the manager used him as the anti-Pogba, the midfielder with whom Mourinho often clashed, and eyebrows were raised when McTominay started ahead of the Frenchman in a Champions League last-16 away game against Sevilla in February 2018, as they were when he started as a central defender in a dire defeat at West Ham just before Mourinho was sacked the following December.
McTominay has come off the bench in United’s two Premier League games so far this season (Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Mourinho invented a new award of ‘Manager’s Player of the Year’ for McTominay. The Portuguese, who dubbed him ‘The Kid’, was an advocate of a player who grew up in Lancaster, 50 miles north of Manchester. McTominay’s mother Julie is from nearby Morecambe and his father, Frank, is from Glasgow. Both sit in the Stretford End among the fans. Frank is at every away game, too.
Both Solskjaer and Mourinho felt his key attributes were his physicality and mentality, that he never shirked anything, that he was aggressive, committed and got pumped up for matches. They never heard excuses from him and considered McTominay the most selfless player at United. At times, his aggression needed to be checked.
McTominay joined United at age 10 and they stuck with him and allowed him to grow. There are coaches there who’ll tell you that other clubs would have let a small, slim and gangly teenager go, but staffer Nicky Butt, a former first-team United midfielder himself, noticed his bravery and how he tried to dominate games.
Even today, there are people at United who are gutted that McTominay is leaving because they rated him as an important player who was good to start in a lot of games and also an excellent substitute at multiple positions when needed. And he was certainly needed last October, when he came off the bench to score twice in stoppage time and snatch a 2-1 home win against Brentford. He finished last season with a creditable 10 goals in all competitions.
McTominay scores against Brentford last season (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
The United fans who are fine with him leaving don’t think McTominay was at the same technical level as other players in his position at major clubs. This isn’t disputed — he is no Paul Scholes — but football is about more than your first XI and more than one person inside the club winced at the level of criticism he received.
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“He does play forward more than he gets credit for,” one source, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, said of McTominay. “And he was taught to get the ball down and get it forward quickly to stretch opponents, which he did.”
Italy can be good for McTominay, just as it has been for Chris Smalling. who also wanted more minutes than he was getting at United when he felt he was at his peak. Smalling has never regretted his move to Rome in 2019 and McTominay will find out that while Morecambe Bay has its attributes, it’s not the Mediterranean, with the delights of Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast on his new doorstep.
He’ll be able to handle the ferocious atmosphere in Naples and will relish the chance to be the dominant midfielder in their side, something he pushed hard to be during a difficult period for United.
(Top photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
