Nick Cox: Celebrating 85 years of MUJAC

“The men who came before them and the ones that stood beside them.

“Let the ones no longer with us tell the ones who lined today.

“This is Manchester United! Built on Sir Matt Busby Way!

“There is a bond. There is a code. There is a way that Reds should play.

“And the future will be founded on the way we behave today.”

We were privileged to hear these rousing words from local poet and friend of the club Tony Walsh at our final Academy all-staff meeting of 2023.

As the year draws to an end, staff are reviewing this year’s achievements and thinking about how we can improve our processes in 2024. But while we look forward, we are aware that we have a duty. A duty as custodians of a unique history, the greatest footballing story ever told that has always had the Academy at its heart. It’s the thing that really sets us as a club apart, our history, and we must maintain an awareness of our past success and a continued focus on the values on which it was driven.

Youth development has been the lifeblood of Manchester United for more than 90 years now and we recently took the opportunity to properly celebrate another anniversary: 85 years since the foundation of the Manchester United Junior Athletic Club (MUJAC).

Being aware of anniversaries and stories such as this one is not just us paying lip service to our past. I believe there are lessons to be taken from them.

Tony Walsh first delivered his incredible This Is The Place poem, which emphasises the unique, revolutionary spirit of Manchester as a city. At the end of the meeting he then passionately recited Jimmy Murphy, Without Whom, a wonderful, stirring tribute to the inimitable legend who paved the way for us today. That quote at the top is from the latter poem. It sums our beliefs up perfectly, a desire to act as custodians to the club’s history, values, spirit and culture. That is one of the fundamentals of our Academy strategy.

Our second speaker at the all-staff meeting was Harry Robinson, author of The Men Who Made Manchester United, who detailed the early history of the Academy and MUJAC, showing us how Tony’s words have rung true for nearly nine decades. The values laid down throughout this club’s history really are still impacting our work today.

A concerted focus on youth development began in 1932 with the arrival of club President James W. Gibson, a Salford-born, Manchester-raised uniform manufacturer who saved the club from bankruptcy. Within weeks of his arrival, Gibson had stabilised United’s finances, brought in some new signings for the first team and improved facilities for spectators at Old Trafford.

But while necessary, those actions weren’t his most important. It was his remark in a board meeting at the end of March 1932 that it might be advisable to begin “running a colts team or nursery as from next season.” The matter was left in the very capable hands of Walter Crickmer, club secretary, who got things going. We celebrated this anniversary — 90 years of youth at the club — last season.

But the ‘A’ Team which was founded, while very successful, was very much a youth team rather than an Academy. Gibson, Crickmer and chief scout Louis Rocca wanted more.

And so, in 1938, they founded the MUJAC. They took another step forward. MUJAC was designed to ensure that none of the most promising talents in the area around Old Trafford — where there were 250+ schoolboy teams and upwards of 3,000 young players — would slip through the net. Its mission was to provide an opportunity for local young lads to learn and to thrive.

Crucially, one message stayed clear. James Gibson insisted that the boys selected to join MUJAC would, if they showed themselves good enough to become professionals, have no obligation to join United. He simply hoped they would ‘consider’ it. He wanted the experience in the MUJAC teams to be such a positive one as people as well as footballers that they would be desperate to represent their local team for the rest of their careers.

Things have, of course, changed, but that message links to today. When a new player and their parents are considering joining our club, we make no promises that they will become a first-team player. We make no promises that they will become a professional footballer. All I promise is that they will enjoy a life-enriching and life-changing experience by being a part of our Academy and that we dedicate ourselves to helping them maximise their potential.

The original MUJACs were brought to the club in a variety of ways. Louis Rocca, chief scout, already had an informal network of local school teachers and priests who would recommend to him young, talented footballers. He reaped the rewards of this with some good players, but MUJAC formalised, improved and expanded this. Engagement with the community was essential, as it remains today.

Our Pre-Academy, Emerging Talent and development centre programmes are designed to offer as many routes into our Academy as possible, while helping grassroots clubs and their coaches to improve. We want to help lift the quality of football in the north west of an England as a whole. Through these programmes and elsewhere, our wonderful talent identification staff work tirelessly across the country, directly following in the footsteps of legendary figures like Rocca.

Once the boys were part of MUJAC, they loved it.

“The enthusiasm shown by the boys, many of whom come straight from their work to train at Old Trafford twice a week has also been an encouraging feature,” wrote Tom Jackson in the Manchester Evening News back in 1939.

I can safely say that enthusiasm remains, and at all levels. We try to make the coaching experience as joyful as possible for the young people involved in our programme. It has to remain child-like. We don’t want to fall into the trap of excessive or premature professionalism.

At the older age groups, there are few more unique and rewarding experiences that our Under-18s playing their FA Youth Cup matches at Old Trafford. The first youth team to play there was the MUJACs at the end of their first season, playing an exhibition game against Everton, who also had a strong youth side. Eighty-five years on, these Youth Cup games are an incredible night for our players, whether they go on to play at the Theatre of Dreams another 300 or 400 times or if they just make that one appearance. It’s still a life-changing moment.

Not every Academy has the privilege of playing at their club’s main stadium so often, but it’s a crucial learning opportunity. Those of them that carve out a future career as professional footballers will look back at this game as one key step in their progress, others who go on to achieve success elsewhere may simple reflect on it as an incredible memory. That’s what we’re about, giving our boys life-enriching moments and helping them on the way to being their best selves.

Experiences like these can be hard to deal with, too. And our new Alumni programme — driven brilliantly by Andy Laylor (Academy Player Support Co-ordinator) – partly focuses on helping players we’ve worked with long after they’ve left the club, whether that be with mental health, new career pathways or physical recovery.

I have often come into the Academy building at Carrington in the past and seen one of my staff chatting and catching up with a former player, having invited them in. We have some amazing members of staff who have always made an effort to do this. But the Alumni programme is about formalising that, making sure that we are open to anyone who has spent time with us in the past so we can help them or actively reach out to them to make sure they’re okay. Like MUJAC, it’s a process of formalising these processes to make them better and more comprehensive.

As for the celebration of MUJAC, it’s certainly a worthy one. The scheme was an enormous success. Two teams were created after a trial day at The Cliff in August 1938 and they ran riot in local, open-age leagues.

It was an exciting time for United. In 1939, the first team achieved their best finish in a decade, the Reserves won the Central League, the ‘A’ Team won the Manchester Amateur League and the MUJACs won the Chorlton Amateur League. At the end of the season, the MUJACs played that double-header against Everton. United won at Old Trafford and Everton won at Goodison Park.

Things weren’t quite so smooth after that first season. Unfortunately, the Second World War broke out in the same year. You might think that would derail United’s commitment to youth, but club secretary Walter Crickmer didn’t allow that, and by the middle of the war, United had re-established all five teams, including three youth sides. It was this heroic effort that set Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy up for success after the war ended in 1945. We finished second two seasons on the bounce and reached the FA Cup final in 1948.

The team that faced Blackpool in that Wembley final included three MUJAC graduates, three who played in the ‘A’ Team in the ‘30s and two lads — Jack Crompton and Henry Cockburn — who came through the Goslings scheme, one of Crickmer and Rocca’s more inventive ways of progressing youth onwards during the war. That’s a story for another time!

United won the FA Cup that year, and won a league title in 1952. After those successes, Busby and Murphy ripped the team up and filled it up with graduates coming out of their revitalised youth set-up, built on MUJAC and expanded to target the best young players across England, not just Manchester. Fast forward several decades and we now see young boys like Alejandro Garnacho who arrived here from another country a teenager, learnt in our Academy and is now shining on the big stage.

Things develop at this club and things change in football, but those values that MUJAC began with, that sense of excitement and opportunity, I don’t think that’s ever gone away and as custodians of our rich past, we’ll do our utmost to ensure it never does.