IF OLD Trafford is the Theatre of Dreams, then Carrington is the factory for them. Inside Manchester United’s training complex, Brian McClair speaks quietly, yet passionately, about his role as head of the club’s academy. His hair is greyer and his face ruddier than when he was a player with Motherwell, Celtic, United and Scotland, yet he still conveys the same intelligence as he talks.

“I only ever had two ambitions when I was growing up. One was to be a professional football player. The only other thing that attracted me, I think because of the length of the holidays, was teaching. I fulfilled my ambition of being a footballer, arguably, and I am now teaching football. We have kids in here from eight years of age and you come in and see them smiling before training, smiling during training and going home with a smile. Playing in the games, we encourage that atmosphere as the performance and playing well are much more important than the result.”

Yet there is another, much darker, side to his work. Probably only one per cent of their annual role of 160 will make it from Carrington to a first-team match at Old Trafford. For some, rejection is inevitable and must be handled sensitively. “Every year, you are inviting kids to buy into a dream,” adds McClair. “We try our best to keep them all for at least two years – unless they are really struggling and it is not beneficial because they are lagging so far behind it is actually making them unhappy.”

In some ways, this is the most brutal side of football, yet McClair seems content to have opted out of the managerial roles which former teammates and friends such as Steve Bruce, Mark Hughes, Paul Ince and Roy Keane now hold in England’s top flight. “There are now two distinct paths postcareer. You have the professional side, and the education or teaching side. I am happy doing what I am doing, and it makes a big difference if it makes you happy. Now you can see a career in youth development; traditionally you got a job as a youth or maybe reserve coach, then first-team coach and then perhaps you fancied being a manager. We try to avoid that sort of situation. Paul McGuiness is the under18 coach here and I would like him to be the under18 coach, as long as he is enjoying it, for his whole career. A lot of the time you can see that people fit into certain things. I went to Blackburn as first-team coach, so I have had a year in the emotional side of the game, I suppose, getting relegated and getting sacked.”

There is a pressure to produce players given United’s heritage of doing so under Sir Matt Busby and now, Sir Alex Ferguson, yet the youth system is constrained by Premier League rules. Players must live within an hour’s drive of the academy until they are 14 and within 90 minutes of it until they are 16. McClair believes Ferguson’s golden crop of Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Nicky Butt and the Neville brothers would not have emerged under the current circumstances.

“People go on about that era, the kids we won the league with, but David Beckham was in London and would have stayed in London, perhaps signed for our academy there. Paul Scholes would have been at Oldham, we would never have seen him and it would certainly be very difficult to get him out. Nicky Butt was at City, Giggsy was at City. Phil and Gary [Neville] would almost certainly have signed for Bury because their parents were both working for Bury. There is a possibility we wouldn’t have got any of them.”

There is also a scouting system, extended after Ferguson’s reneged retirement into a global network. For example, United now have three scouts in Brazil, from where the Da Silva brothers or “new Nevilles” were plucked from Fluminese, and one in Argentina. It is far harder for prospects such as Cameron Stewart, a young right-sided player with pace, whose mother hails from Hamilton, or Daniel Galbraith, a midfielder from Galashiels, to break through into the first team from the youth and reserve sides.

Ferguson, though, retains an interest in what is coming through and will often wander past youth games, making his presence felt. McClair still marvels at the manager’s inner drive, which he feels continues to propel the club forwards. “It’s what he wants to do,” he explains. “I used to love it on the first day back after the summer – well, I didn’t love coming back for preseason, but I used to like the manager’s statement because he used to come in and ask who was willing to climb back up to the top of the mountain, you know. He’d say, ‘We have been successful before but that’s all gone, it’s finished now’. It’s always been the same thing with him and I think it is the consistency of that. He wants to be successful. He wants to work hard. He likes working hard.”

Prospects are far more pampered now than when McClair served his apprenticeship at Aston Villa before returning to Scotland with Motherwell. He recalls leaving boots soaking in the bath so he could squeeze into them, which now would bring a look of horror to the podiatrist who cares for the perfect feet of the academy boys. There is a danger, he concedes, that such cossetting could prove counter-productive.

“There is a bit of that, yeah, but maybe there is a bit of that with kids anyway. I still think if you look throughout the world the majority of kids come from working-class backgrounds. You do sometimes think they should wash their own kit or play on a bumpy pitch or whatever. You just have to perform the best you can with that. I think it is recognising that could be a problem and dealing with it. Everyone here understands how the manager expects you to behave and I don’t think that has ever changed so there is a high level of discipline here, because everybody is representing Manchester United. If you are travelling for an hour from here by car, you can almost get to the other side of Yorkshire. There’s always going to be the possibility you will miss kids from poorer backgrounds.”