Ex-mentor full of praise for imminent Man Utd signing Toby Collyer | OneFootball

Former Brighton U18 coach Mark Beard is convinced by the potential of imminent Manchester United signing Toby Collyer.

The Worthing-born youngster has captained England at under-16 and under-17 level but Sussex Live reports he will join the Red Devils this summer, after interest from them, Chelsea, and West Ham United.

The 18-year-old, who also trained with the Hammers and United, is out of contract at the Seagulls this summer and Beard, who now coaches non league side Dorking Wanderers, said he will become a "top-class player".

"I was working with the under 15s and under 16s and he was in the under 12 or 13s. I got to coach him once a week then. He rose through the ages and I went up to the under-18s," he told Sussex Live.

"Even when he was an under-15 he trained with us [the under-18s] a lot. Even though he didn't play a great deal at under-16 he still trained. You could see he was going to be a top-class player.

"He is a pleasure to coach. He is so low maintenance, what I mean by that is you don't know he is there. He gets on with his job. He regularly put in displays of 8/10 at the least. He had the best running stats, runs 13 kilometres a game, breaks things up. He is so unassuming, he gets on with his job.

"You want 11 of these type of players in the team. You know what you're going to get in training, he works hard, he wants to improve, he's intelligent. He's a good all-round kid.

"He is more of a defensive midfielder but we tried to get a bit more out of him. In training he would do a one vs one exercise and he could do it so easily so we just wanted him to add that to his game.

"So rather than just sideways passing or good quality forward passing, just have a little dribble because he was very good at travelling with the ball as well. We tried getting that into him."