Man Utd’s Deal for Liverpool Youngster Comes With Historic Implications

Manchester United have recruited 16-year-old winger Isaac Konde for their U-18 team. The significant move coincides with the saga that could soon see JJ Gabriel depart the club, while also serving as a rare example of a player moving directly between the Red Devils and Liverpool.

United announced the signing this week, with Konde posing for official photographs at Old Trafford. A statement referred to him as a “talented youngster” and said “everyone at the club would like to welcome Isaac to United and wish him the very best of luck.”

Konde turns 17 next month, at which point he is eligible to sign his first professional contract. The Athletic reports that an overall five-year deal has been agreed, suggesting there is both considerable faith in his ability and a long-term plan of development in place.

But leaving Liverpool for Manchester United and vice versa is rare. It happens infrequently at the youth level and is almost unheard of when senior players are involved.

Before Konde, Ethan Ennis made the same move in 2021, moving from Liverpool to Manchester. He was 16 at the time and ultimately reached United’s U-21 team, but departed on a permanent transfer this past summer to League One’s Stockport County. Defender Scott Wootton swapped Liverpool for United around his 16th birthday in 2007 and later played four first-team games.

A handful of others in the 21st century were much younger.

Charlie McNeill had a reputation as a goal machine at the youth level, said to have scored more than 600. He was born in Manchester but had a brief affiliation with Liverpool before joining United around the age of eight. The striker went to Manchester City and back to United but now, aged 23, is a Sheffield Wednesday player on loan at Crewe Alexandra.

Jack Harrison was seven years old at Liverpool before heading to United’s academy and spending seven years there. He actually made his name in the United States after leaving England altogether aged 14, but played 181 Premier League games for Leeds and Everton.

The Last Player to Transfer Between Man Utd, Liverpool

Phil Chisnall, 1962 — Phil Chisnall holds one of soccer’s quirkier records. | Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Ultimately, no professional player has gone directly between the rival clubs for 62 years. The last example of that was Phil Chisnall, a homegrown Manchester United forward who graduated to the first team in the years that followed 1958’s Munich air disaster. He played 47 times and scored 10 goals. But his opportunities seemed to quickly dry up around the same time that George Best emerged and was presented with the chance to join Liverpool in 1964, still aged just 21.

Back then, a rivalry between two industrial cities in northwest England had existed for a couple of centuries, but a fierce sporting rivalry did not. Manchester City and Everton had been the more prominent clubs from Manchester and Liverpool respectively in the 1930s, and United and Liverpool didn’t consistently cross paths competing for the same things until the latter half of the 1960s. Legendary managers Matt Busby and Bill Shankly were even great friends.

By the 1970s, the rivalry that we know today was quickly taking shape.

Liverpool began Chisnall’s first season as England’s reigning champions. United then won the league championship that year. But he only played nine times for his new team and joined Southend United in 1967. His career wrapped with Stockport County in 1972 and he quit soccer before turning 30.

Gabriel Heinze tried to force a transfer across the divide from Old Trafford to Anfield in 2007 but was denied, with United choosing to sell the Argentine defender to Real Madrid instead.

Man Utd’s U-18 Recruitment Drive

Konde is not the only academy player to join United from a rival club in recent days. Central midfielder David Eze, another 16-year-old, is now with the Red Devils after leaving Manchester City. Last week, it was Karim Cassim, a 17-year-old, also brought in from City.

But it works both ways, because United recently saw James Scanlon and Habeeb Ogunneye—slightly older and on the cusp of first-team soccer—leave and join Arsenal.

Rio Ngumoha was in Chelsea’s academy for eight years until he signed with Liverpool a few days after his 16th birthday in 2024. The aforementioned Gabriel, of course, had whirlwind affiliations with Arsenal, Chelsea and West Ham United, before moving out of London.

When Gabriel’s situation was discussed by Gary Neville on a recent episode of Stick to Football, he noted how the academy game has changed since he was an up-and-coming talent 35 years ago. “We know now that young players have got representation at that age. We know that they are actually more willing to make braver decisions than maybe we were in our day,” he said.

“If you were at United as a kid, or Liverpool, you were at that club—you weren’t leaving.”

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