• Striker has also attracted attention from Arsenal and Spurs
• Steven Gerrard says he will not pressure Rangers over transfers

Manchester United have an agreement in place to sign Sunderland teenager Joe Hugill.

The 16-year-old striker is set to join the United academy next season, should the move receive Premier League ratification.

Related: Manchester City set to run down Sané's contract despite Bayern interest

Related: Project Restart: the hurdles Premier League football must clear to resume | Paul MacInnes

• Rojo was pictured smoking and playing cards with friends
• Defender was loaned to Estudiantes in January

Manchester United will remind Marcos Rojo of his responsibilities after the defender was filmed appearing to flout Argentina’s coronavirus lockdown rules.

Related: Matteo Darmian: 'Rashford can reach Mbappé level and win Ballon d'Or'

The former Manchester United player, now at Parma, discusses his time in England, the criticism of Paul Pogba and living in lockdown

Matteo Darmian is discussing the players who impressed him the most during his four years at Manchester United. He describes how Wayne Rooney stood out from “the first training session” to such a degree that the Italian had to have a stern word with himself: he hadn’t moved to England to stand around admiring his teammates in training; he had to make an impression himself.

Then he pauses and says: “There was another player who really impressed me …” and his mind wanders back to the day when a certain teenager trained with the first team for the first time. The kid in question blew Darmian away. “I still remember Marcus Rashford’s first session with the senior squad like it was yesterday. I immediately thought: ‘wow, this is an incredible player’. He did so many impressive things for a player of his age and the way he improved in every detail really impressed me.”

Related: Real Madrid's Lucas Vázquez: 'You have to be tough and find your own path'

Related: Is the gravity-defying Manchester United brand facing a fall back to earth? | Barney Ronay

United are the most extreme debt-loaded commercial model, predicated on constant growth. What happens when it crashes?

What’s your favourite bit of non-football-football so far? In my opinion the best new sub-genre to emerge is pictures of José Mourinho delivering vegetables.

You don’t have to go looking for them. They just turn up on your social media feed or on the click-bar beneath a news story. Handsome, crinkly José carrying a box of lettuce across the tenement threshold. José in a surgical mask distributing radishes to elderly war heroes. José off-camera giving a secret briefing against the fucking artichoke guy who isn’t pulling his weight (premium content: subscribers only).

Related: Next season's cup competitions may suffer, says United's Woodward

Gareth Bale went on to win the Champions League four times, but many of his contemporaries had already peaked

By Martin Laurence for WhoScored

There is an assumption that footballers get better with age before peaking in their late twenties and regressing in their thirties. The theory goes that players improve with greater experience before their fitness deteriorates and they inevitably get worse. However, a look back at the best players aged 21 or under in the 2009-10 season shows that not every promising youngster is destined for greater things.

Related: When Arsenal won a 'world title' despite having their physio sent off

Related: Gareth Bale gives almost £1m to fight coronavirus in Spain and Wales

Related: Nicklas Bendtner: ‘Henry tells me to shut up. I shout back that he should shut up’

We look at players who have been important to the their clubs but perhaps not always received the credit they deserved

Part one: from Arsenal to Liverpool

Position Forward Time at club 2011-16 League apps/goals 130/50

Related: Underrated Premier League players: part one, from Arsenal to Liverpool

• Vice-chairman sounds warning of knock-on effect
• ‘It’s always a top priority for us to strengthen the team’

Next season’s FA Cup and League Cup competitions may be affected if the 2020-21 Premier League season is truncated because of coronavirus, according to Ed Woodward. Manchester United’s executive vice-chairman is also unclear whether the club will be able to resume their 2019‑20 FA Cup campaign.

The future of this season remains in the balance and the situation will be discussed by Premier League clubs at a meeting on Friday. Woodward hinted that the domestic cup competitions could be threatened whenever the next campaign starts.

Related: Manchester United apply to install rail seating at Old Trafford

Former Manchester United striker on living in lockdown, how lots of transplant patients ‘hate themselves’, and the value of support

Andy Cole gazes out of my laptop screen and, even in our strange virtual world, I can see clearly how his face creases with pain. His familiar voice resonates around the room as he explains how low he has felt these past weeks while in self-isolation and dealing with the continuing problems of a kidney transplant in 2017.

“There are many, many times when I want to give up, period, not just on life but give up on everything,” Cole says. “It becomes so difficult. I was struggling last Wednesday. It totally came out of the blue and I had to stay in bed. I conceded defeat and accepted that today’s not going to be my day. Previously, I would fight. But, ultimately, I know I can’t beat it.”

Related: PSG's Nadia Nadim: 'I know the value of helping a person when they have no hope'

• Club intend to have it in place for next season
• If trial is successful more barrier seats will be added

Manchester United will trial 1,500 barrier seats that will allow fans to stand next season, after being given permission by Trafford council.

Standing at top-flight games has been banned since 1994 on the recommendation of the Taylor report which followed the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in which 96 Liverpool fans died.

Related: Underrated Premier League players: part one, from Arsenal to Liverpool

Our cartoonist casts his mind back to March 1994 and a famous four-goal County Ground showdown

• Buy a copy of this cartoon at our print shop
• Take a look through our cartoonist’s archive

Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Nicky Bandini and John Brewin discuss Manchester United 0-1 Arsenal from 2002, Sir Alex Ferguson v Arsène Wenger, legacies, tackles, Mark Venus, ‘Project Restart’ and Detective Wilson

Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

Max, Barry, Nicky and John discuss the game between United and Arsenal towards the end of the 2001-02 season, where it sat in the evolution of the rivalry between Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, violence in football, and the latest on the effect that Covid-19 is having on football.

• Executive vice-chairman says ‘business as usual’ unlikely
  
• Huge transfers unlikely to be seen anywhere this summer

Ed Woodward has warned it may not be “business as usual” for Manchester United in the next transfer window, the executive vice-chairman saying that spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a player could ignore the financial impact of coronavirus.

Covid-19 has caused the suspension of football since early March and there is uncertainty over when it will return. Woodward pointed to this when assessing the level of finance Ole Gunnar Solskjær may have to strengthen his squad.

Related: Manchester United's setup shines as seniors help locked-down youngsters | Tanya Aldred

Club’s compassionate approach recognises that lockdown life ‘leaves a big hole’ for children ripped from their usual routines

Last Friday I had a good old-fashioned nosy at Ryan Giggs’s kitchen, close enough to check out his fancy light fittings – if only virtually. Like much of the past month, it was a surreal experience, this one conjured up by the youth development team at Manchester United.

When, one Saturday morning in 2014, a man in a padded jacket slid along the touchline to hand me his number on a scrap of paper, I looked at him blankly. He said he was a scout for United and would like to get my son down to the development centre to take a closer look. I was pretty dubious – our little boy was only five.

Related: 'A player above millions of others' – the night Ronaldo lit up Old Trafford

Related: 'Beyond anything I’d played with': Rashford says Ibrahimovic key to his rise

Manchester United hoped to overturn a first-leg defeat against Real Madrid in April 2003 but the Brazilian had other ideas

Seventeen years ago on Thursday Manchester United took on Real Madrid in a seismic Champions League quarter-final second leg at Old Trafford. United had lost 3-1 at the Bernabéu, Raúl scoring twice and Luis Figo once.

Ruud van Nistelrooy had given Sir Alex Ferguson’s team a precious away goal and for the return the manager, who was already without the suspended Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, dropped David Beckham. The game, however, was to be remembered by a glittering display for the away side from Ronaldo.

Related: Ronaldo at 40: Il Fenomeno’s legacy as greatest ever No9, despite dodgy knees | Rob Smyth

OTD in 2003...

Ronaldo's stunning hat-trick
Beckham's free-kick pearler
A seven-goal thriller ⚽️

Champions League fireworks at Old Trafford! pic.twitter.com/0TrEGWOdIV

• Manchester United striker also says Mourinho improved him
• Rashford admits he would not have been 100% fit for Euro 2020

Marcus Rashford has said he is recovering well from a serious back injury and pointed to Zlatan Ibrahimovic and José Mourinho as key to his development at Manchester United.

The striker had scored a career-best 19 goals before sustaining a double stress fracture in mid-January. Ole Gunnar Solskjær said it was “touch and go” whether Rashford would play again this season, and the 22-year-old’s has benefited from football’s coronavirus shutdown in terms of his recuperation.

Related: Mourinho, tears and defiance: the story of Inter's 2009-10 season | Nicky Bandini

• Coronavirus brings change to United’s transfer strategy
• Tottenham striker would cost in the region of £150m

Manchester United are redrawing their transfer strategy because of financial uncertainty caused by coronavirus and accept it will leave them unable to buy a striker as expensive as Harry Kane.

A proven goalscorer of the quality of Tottenham’s centre-forward is among prospective targets for Ole Gunnar Solskjær. In a regular summer United would make the money available for the manager to consider a move for the 26-year-old, who has said he will not stay at Spurs “for the sake of it” if he does not feel his boyhood club are going in the right direction.

Related: Tottenham's Son Heung-min starts military service in South Korea

These players, one from each Premier League club, may not have made much of an impression in England but have proven their worth elsewhere

Arsenal – Kristoffer Olsson (Krasnodar) In two years at Arsenal the Swede appeared in one matchday squad and made it on to the pitch for 36 minutes of a League Cup tie at West Brom (scoring in the penalty shootout). He moved on, initially to Midtjylland in Denmark, and after a spell at AIK in Sweden he joined Krasnodar in January 2019. This season he has been a key player in midfield, with his team second in Russia’s Premier League.

Aston Villa – Pierluigi Gollini (Atalanta) A £4.25m signing from the Serie B side Hellas Verona in 2016, Gollini held down a first-team spot for barely four months before Steve Bruce brought in Mark Bunn, more than 10 years Gollini’s senior, before Christmas. “Bunn gives you that bit of experience,” he said. “I just felt with young Pier, it was a bit too much for him. I find him very young.” The following month he joined Atalanta, initially on loan, and he has been their first-choice goalkeeper since March 2019. He has had an outstanding season and made his full international debut in November.