Highly-rated 15-year-old talent JJ Gabriel has requested to leave Manchester United.<\/p>\n
The forward – whose father Joe O’Cearuill played for St Patrick’s Athletic and was twice capped for the Republic of Ireland – has been tipped as a future star. He spent time training with Michael Carrick’s side before making his first senior appearance off the bench in August\u2019s friendly against Atletico Madrid.<\/p>\n
United had planned to include Gabriel in the squad for the first time in a competitive match in Wednesday\u2019s Carabao Cup tie against Brighton, putting him in line to become the club\u2019s youngest ever player.<\/p>\n
But the Red Devils have been rocked by a request from Gabriel\u2019s camp to leave, raising huge doubts over his Old Trafford future.<\/p>\n
There is hope within the club that the situation can be rectified given his deal with United runs until the summer and he cannot be deregistered.<\/p>\n
However the Daily Mail report<\/a> that Barcelona are very interested in Gabriel, who holds an Irish passport and can therefore leave the UK to play in Europe when he turns 16.<\/p>\n The news is an unwanted distraction and comes less than a week after his hat-trick heroics on his UEFA Youth League debut against Sabah.<\/p>\n Speaking after that 5-0 win, Adam Lawrence, who coached the team in his role as United\u2019s professional development phase lead, said: “JJ is surrounded by people that really, really believe in him from the top of the club right the way through.<\/p>\n “He\u2019s been at the club for so long. He\u2019s got real good relationships with the players, with the staff, so I think over the course of time obviously that helps as well.<\/p>\n “At the moment, just in terms of his game, his games programme, his training programme, it\u2019s about making sure that he\u2019s getting the right exposure across different levels.<\/p>\n “We\u2019re obviously not perfect but it\u2019s definitely something we put a lot of thought into, so it\u2019s good to see him enjoying his football in a good place.”<\/p>\n Gabriel does not turn 16 until October and has already amassed 844,000 followers on Instagram. The account was recently wiped of all posts.<\/p>\n The forward last season became the youngest ever winner of the club\u2019s Jimmy Murphy Young Player of the Year award.<\/p>\n Listen to the RT\u00c9 Soccer podcast on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Highly-rated 15-year-old talent JJ Gabriel has requested to leave Manchester United. The forward – whose father Joe O’Cearuill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-625569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}