Manchester United legend, Gary Neville has revealed that he never agreed with former manager, Ruben Amorim for benching Kobbie Mainoo after claiming both players are fighting for the same position, Softfootball reports.
The Portuguese never started Mainoo in the premier league this season until Michael Carrick arrived as Manchester United’s caretaker manager. He gave Kobbie Mainoo his premier league start in Manchester United’s 2-0 victory over Manchester City and repeated the same line-up the following week as the Red Devils defeated Arsenal 3-2 at the Emirates.
Speaking during the Overlap’s official podcast, Gary Neville revisited the issue as he believed the club almost lost a fantastic player following Mainoo’s search for game-time in a World Cup year.
I never liked the handling of Mainoo. When Ruben Amorim said in the start of the season, that it was basically either him or Bruno Fernandes, I never agreed with that. It killed him to be fair publicly and he never put him in the team at all apart from Grimsby but if you watch Kobbie now in the two games, that was nearly pushing a talented player out of the club before he even really had a chance to perform to be fair. You look at him now in these two matches and you think, how could that be?
Kobbie Mainoo drew interest from clubs like Napoli, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Bayern Munich as he wasn’t comfortable being a benchwarmer in Amorim’s system.
Here is the video posted by Ovalap’s official podcast of Gary Neville talking about Kobbie Mainoo. Watch below.
"We nearly pushed a talented player out of the club!" 😯
Kobbie Mainoo has played his way back in, imagine if Man United had let him go… 💭 pic.twitter.com/iJTNkYffit
— The Overlap (@WeAreTheOverlap) January 30, 2026Mainoo will be one of the first names on Michael Carrick’s starting XI as Manchester United host in-form Fulham at Old Trafford on Sunday.
