Mazraoui reveals moment it all changed

The 26-year-old defender admits it was touch and go whether he would be able to make it in the professional game, when he became part of the Jong Ajax side, the Amsterdam giants' second team, as a teenager.

During an absorbing interview with the new edition of Inside United, the official club magazine, the Morocco international opened up about the shift in mindset that triggered his remarkable rise that has ended up with him signing for the Reds from Bayern Munich this summer.

"When I became older and more mature, it was still, yeah, almost 50-50 [whether I would make it]," he said in October's issue. "I went and played professional football without a contract. And, what you said, it was do or die because, at that moment, you come to the point of no return.

"It’s either you go for it fully or that’s it. You will just make steps upwards or, from there on, it could be the end of your career, but you cannot even say your career as it was not even at the beginning.

"So that was a little bit the case when I became 18 or 19 years old and, from there on, something in my head just switched.

"It was just that I went fully for it," he recalled. "And, yeah, from that moment on, I didn’t look back anymore about how I went through the stages and through the Academy, or even this moment.

"I didn’t look back anymore. I just looked forward. I had a goal and that was to fight for a contract and to be a professional footballer because I was just so close, I could smell it. And, yeah, if you don’t make it, it would be that you will regret that for the rest of your life. And I wouldn’t want to live with that.”

Read the interview in full with Noussair Mazraoui in the latest edition of Inside United, out now.