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Former Manchester United player, Timothy Fosu-Mensah, has given an interview about the injury struggles that have blighted his career to date.
According to The Manchester Evening News, “Timothy Fosu-Mensah had good intentions when he left Manchester United three years ago, but now he must wonder whether he would have been better off staying instead”.
At 26 years old, the former United academy player is nowhere near as close to starting games on a regular basis as he would have hoped when he rejected a new deal at Old Trafford in search of more playing time.
In fact, he has only played 30 games in three years due to extensive injury issues. In a quite unbelievable statistic, he “has spent 935 days injured in his professional career and has been unavailable for 146 games as a result”.
It is easy to forget how talented the youngster was. When on loan at Crystal Palace in the 2017-2018 season, Manchester City’s Leroy Sane called the Dutchman one of his “toughest opponents”.
Speaking to the newspaper, the 26 year old spoke of how helpful Jose Mourinho was to his development.
“I spent the full [2016/17] season with the first team and as a result of that, I completed a full pre-season with them for the first time. I was still a teenager when Jose Mourinho arrived and he helped me mature into becoming a man in footballing terms”.
“Jose was tough on young players with his demands but in a good way because he wanted you to be ready to represent a club the size of Manchester United. He helped make me stronger mentally and physically”.
The former Ajax player went on to praise the Portuguese coach further by claiming, “overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed working under Jose Mourinho. He was really good with me as a young player. He is open-minded and he is a very good manager, as his career has shown”.
However, two seasons of loans at Palace and Fulham and a knee ligament injury meant that the defender didn’t make a United matchday squad between May 2017 and June 2020.
Fosu-Mensah would go on to make four appearances for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, including the FA Cup and Europa League semi-finals of the 2019-2020 campaign.
The fullback started the opening day of the 2020-21 campaign but was deemed to play poorly, so received few chances thereafter from the Norwegian coach. Thus, once offered a new deal, he claims that he rejected it due to feeling “undervalued” by the terms of the deal. It was then he decided to try his luck elsewhere.
Commenting on the move he claimed, “it was my decision. The manager was good to me but at the end, I was not playing a lot. When you are 22, 23, or 24 years old you need to be playing. I didn’t play much and I wanted to. It was the best decision in the end to go somewhere else where I would get more minutes”.
The Bayer Leverkusen player has no ill feeling towards Solskjaer and credits him for giving him a chance after the long injury layoff.
“Ole has been very good to me. I spoke with him because he had a big injury as a player so he knew exactly how I felt. When I played against Crystal Palace after 16 months, he was very happy for me. These were very good moments. He knew I had the quality. I have no bad things to say about him because he has been very good to me”.
All United fans will certainly be hoping that the former United academy product can once and for all put his injury woes behind him and help Bayer Leverkusen go on to wrestle the Bundesliga title away from the clutches of the juggernaut of Bayern Munich.
