Fernandes: I hate losing - I wouldn’t let my daughter win at Uno!

Speaking on his upcoming episode of UTD Podcast, Bruno was quizzed on his drive to succeed and revealed his will to win is so strong he even struggles to let his three-year-old daughter beat him when they’re playing together.

“Always [I’ve had a competitive personality]. Always. I hate losing. In everything,” he told co-hosts Helen Evans, Sam Homewood and David May.

“Two days ago I was playing Uno with my little daughter and you know, sometimes you just need to let them win. So in this game she plays two +4 [cards], and she lays down +4 twice. She’s young, she doesn’t know so sometimes you ask, do you have any other cards to put down and when I asked, she put another +4 down, so I take another 8 cards.

“Then I got rid of all these cards - bang bang bang and I won that game. I needed to win because I was so angry that she put me twice +4 … she made me pick up all these cards!

“Um… she’s three years old,” Bruno added. “My wife was looking at me and she said to me, ‘You are always the same’. I don’t know how you call it in England… bingo? Ok, well at Christmas in Portugal we always play this, we play five pence per card and we put all the money in the box and who completes the card wins all the money.

“It’s not for a lot of money, it’s just for fun but, even in that, I don’t like to lose. I have to call the numbers out, and I always check the numbers just to be sure. I have to do this because all the time, my family are cheating during this! My uncles, my cousins, everyone! So if you grow up with this, you do what you have to do to win!”

Our no.18 certainly credits his upbringing for his competitive nature and he revealed his friends and family still play a huge role in driving him on today.

“I have a family who have always judged my games, so every time I finish a game I have a message from my mum and my wife – my mum is always the same message, ‘You played well’, with kisses and I love you and everything!

“My wife… no. If I play well, she’ll say, ‘You played well, congratulations’, and if I don’t play well she’ll say, ‘Today was not your day, huh?’. So I get home and I’ll ask her, ‘Why did you say I didn’t play well, explain to me?’ and she’ll say ‘Ah, well you miss a lot of passes’ and I’ll say ‘what do you mean, which passes? Explain to me!’.

“For example, the day after the Newcastle game, my dad sent me a message – and he never sends me a message, he always calls me the day after the game, always – and this message says, ‘Congratulations on your goal, but from tomorrow I will start to explain to you how to take penalties!’.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve missed one penalty in 11 and he’s talking to me about this’, because he never scored a penalty in all the years he was playing football! But this kind of situation helps you improve because all the time you know you have people behind you who will always ask more and demand more from you.

"I also have one friend who is normally that type of guy who will come to you and say, ‘If I have something to tell you, I will tell you, and if you played like s**t, I will tell you – I don’t care’. I’m like, ‘Ok, but sometimes you could just say you played really well today! You don’t need to point out every time I make a mistake – I know I made a mistake, I was playing!’.

“But it’s really nice to have those kind of friends. My brother and my dad are two of the people I listen to the most after games because they’ve played football in the past, they know the way I feel, they understand football, so I like to hear the things they have to tell me.

“Every player has that friend who just says, ‘You played really well, you were the best, you lost because your team-mates didn’t score that goal’ and so on. Everyone has that friend, so you need to have that kind of person like my wife, my brother, my dad, my friend who will say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t your team-mates' fault you didn’t win… it was your fault. You didn’t win because you didn’t play well’."

The Bruno Fernandes episode of UTD Podcast will be available to download or stream here from 17:00 GMT on Monday.

You can also check out the previous episodes via manutd.com/podcast.