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EPL Max Alleyne has made a seamless transition into the Manchester City first team Lewis Storey/Getty Images Anybody who has seen Max Alleyne in his two Manchester City starts over the past week will probably have the same impression: this is a very comfortable, confident defender who is good on the ball and does not look fazed at all. A source close to him says he came off the Etihad Stadium pitch last Wednesday night, after a difficult test against Brighton & Hove Albion in the Premier League, “as if he had just left Powerleague”. The 20-year-old looks so comfortable in his play and body language that it would be easy to say he is extremely laid-back — but that might not be the best description. Advertisement “I think sometimes ‘laid-back’ can have an inference of being a little bit lazy — that definitely isn’t the case for Max, ” Alleyne’s dad, Mark, tells The Athletic. “I use another term, it’s more of a controlled emotional state. I know he really thinks about everything he has to do. And he’s very thorough in his preparation for that. Sometimes, laid-back can give the impression that it’s maybe more of a ‘Comme ci, comme ca — let’s see what happens’, but it’s not like that at all. ” City signed Alleyne from Southampton for a reported £1. 5million in 2021, when he was 16 years old, and sources in the club’s academy were already noting within a couple of months that other defenders in the age group had upped their levels in response to his presence. Fast-forward five years and things have gone almost exactly to plan for Alleyne, if not better, having helped City win the Under-18 and Under-23 Premier League titles and being named their Elite Development Squad player of the season last May. With all academy objectives ticked off, it was time for first-team football elsewhere, and last summer a loan to Watford of the second-tier Championship was agreed, in no small part because they would work closely with him to improve his headers, duels and the nitty-gritty aspects of defending. Last Monday morning though, within hours of Ruben Dias and Josko Gvardiol picking up injuries in the previous day’s Premier League draw with Chelsea, Alleyne was called back to Manchester. He trained with Pep Guardiola’s senior team the next day and was picked to start against Brighton the day after that; before that match, Guardiola showed a team meeting footage of Alleyne in action, and encouraged the 20-year-old to go out and show that quality on the pitch. “You see (in) the way he plays he brings calmness to the build-up, how he creates two-v-one with Rodri all the time, to step, to be close to the structure to break lines, the way he finds he pockets, even how he deals with long balls, when he’s free to make the game calm in these moments, when needed he can clear it as well, ” Pep Lijnders, Guardiola’s assistant, said in a detailed assessment of his attributes following the FA Cup game with third-division Exeter City at the weekend, where Alleyne scored the opening goal. “He needs to make steps with us now, but we’re really happy that he’s back. ” So much so that sources around the first team say he could now be with City’s first team to stay. Advertisement All of this may seem to have happened very suddenly, but Alleyne is well known to Guardiola and his staff, with countless training sessions with City’s senior side under his belt, as well as joining the squad for the Club World Cup in Saudi Arabia in 2023 and being named on the bench for a handful of Premier League and Champions League matches last winter. The plan during the summer was for him to see out the whole season at Watford before returning to City to decide what comes next, but such has been his impact over the last week that he may have jumped up the pecking order of first-team planning. That does not mean that City will not keep pursuing Marc Guehi of Crystal Palace this month, or potentially a back-up option if necessary, because Gvardiol is expected to miss much of the season and there is no clear idea of when John Stones will be available again (though Stones is expected to leave the club when his contract expires in the summer, and Nathan Ake could join him in departing). The thinking is that City could sign a defender this month to make an instant impact and effectively replace one of those anticipated summer exits before they actually leave, and that Alleyne could succeed the other in the squad. Guardiola has long been a fan of Alleyne and it may be that the loan at Watford, as short as it was and despite the fact he had a spell of not getting into their team, has developed his game rapidly. “There’s such a different style of football we’re asked to play, it’s really helped me in duels and learning little tricks in the game, ” Alleyne told reporters on Saturday. “You don’t get many options to do that in the academy. ” With most dominant academy sides having so much possession, and rarely playing against teams who put in high crosses, their defenders can become polished on the ball but inexperienced off it. Knowing this, Watford laid on a training programme dedicated to headers and duels which impressed City and, according to those close to Alleyne, made him a lot more physical in his play. Advertisement The rest of it has been evident since he was a child; at seven, he was invited to a Southampton development centre in Keynsham near Bristol, five miles from the Alleyne family home. “He was very, very much like he is now, ” says dad Mark, who is the head coach at Gloucestershire Cricket Club and a former England all-rounder. “He’s not going to worry too much about too many things. “At the development centre, he turned up in these black shorts and a white T-shirt, and as we got there, all the other boys were in football kits, Liverpool, Man Utd, the lot. As parents, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh’, but he didn’t bat an eyelid. He never asked for a kit, he just did the whole development thing in these black shorts, white T-shirt. “At that time I thought, ‘Wow, he’s got something really laser focused about him’, because he didn’t worry about the peripheral stuff around the game. ” Earlier this season, Alleyne said in an interview at Watford that his father’s sporting pedigree was a benefit, because “he knows what preparation and commitment it takes, and he showed what’s necessary for a professional athlete”. Mark admits to not recognising his son’s potential in those early years — “He’s not a tricks-and-flicks kind of footballer, and neither did he play like that in his local team” — and despite his own sporting pedigree, he kept things simple with his son. “The only bit of advice that I gave, and this is more towards enjoying the game, is that I said, ‘Why don’t you play at the back, so you’ve got the whole game in front of you and you’ll get a lot of the ball? ’. “He actually really grew to enjoy not conceding goals. He loved defence, and he will brag about clean sheets and not conceding. He got the ball off the ’keeper and became the starter of attacks at a young age. The defensive bit is the bit he took on himself, and thought, ‘My job is to keep the ball out of the net’. ” Advertisement Alleyne, who has a twin sister, Alice, and a brother, Jasper, who is a year older, eventually earned his way into what was known as an advanced development group, before joining Southampton’s academy. Mark says: “I remember distinctly, if you go into that group, you got a red Southampton T-shirt and like every other league, they’ll pick a boy and he gets elevated up and he’s given a red T-shirt. One of his closest rivals got this red T-shirt, nothing coming for Max, and me and my wife, Louise, thought, ‘Oooh no, (here’s) the first disappointment we’ve got to deal with’. And he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get my red T-shirt’. “On reflection, I just think he was developing a really hard but focused side of him, which we didn’t even recognise. ” Alleyne did get that red T-shirt in the end and was signed up to Southampton’s academy at the start of secondary school, a setup which involved enrolling at a partner school where time was split between lessons and training. “It was really disruptive and quite tough if I’m honest, in terms of the timings for us as parents, ” his father says, “but he really enjoyed it. Getting up for the early bus at 6: 30, he was never late. I never had to shake him to say, ‘Do you really want to go? ’. ’’ No profile of a talented young footballer would be complete without a story about how they dribbled the ball from their own half to change a game somehow, and despite Alleyne’s more understated approach, he has one too. “He does actually! ” says Mark. “He was at Southampton, and I think it was a semi-final and he got the ball at the back and he went right through to the top of the opposition’s box. He laid it off, and they scored. “It was an amazing moment, but also his reaction afterwards. It sounds like I’m blowing his trumpet but it was as if he knew the game wasn’t done. Everyone was running off celebrating, and he’s trying to get back into position, thinking, ‘Let’s get this game done first before we jump for joy’. That stood out for me as much as the brilliant run. ” Advertisement While a father might be expected to speak glowingly about his son, pretty much everyone who has worked with Alleyne echoes these sentiments: everybody at Watford seems to have nothing but good things to say about him and his character, multiple sources around the City academy and first team say the same, and there are stories from his time in Manchester that go hand-in-hand with those from his early days. Last season, for example, after being named joint captain for City’s Elite Development Squad, he took on sole responsibility for the standards and values within the group and is said to have elevated them to new heights; once, the team bus was able to leave 10 minutes early due to his organisation, which may only be appreciated by anybody with experience of trying to corral a group of teenagers onto one of those in an orderly fashion. There was also a run from deep to set up a late equaliser against Midtjylland of Denmark in the UEFA Youth League last February that is very similar to the example that Mark remembers so fondly, and those strides forward, although not to quite such devastating effect, have been evident with the City first team over the past seven days. City beat Chelsea and Tottenham to Alleyne’s signing after monitoring him closely for around 18 months, with Stuart Thompson, Sam Fagbemi and Carl Walker reporting back to HQ that this was a player worth investing in. “There was a real good feel about the Man City offering, ” Mark says. “Just the way they went about their business, the education there, the opportunity to do further education. I think at the time Vincent Kompany was doing a master’s degree, Rodri had just started one, and that was all quite exciting for us. ” Alleyne recalls there being “a bit of pressure, but not too much” when he first arrived in the City academy and it was seemingly the same when he made the step up to first-team training within a year. “Obviously, training with the first team is quite a big deal, particularly if you are 16, 17, ” Mark says, “but I’ve got a good friend at City and he wrote to me saying, ‘I saw Max today training with the first team’, and that was the first I’d heard of it! You would think a young lad would be messaging back home, saying, ‘You won’t believe what I did today’, but he takes that kind of thing in his stride. ” Mark says that, in terms of style of play, Alleyne “likes John Stones quite a lot” and “in terms of training and aggression, he likes Dias quite a bit”, while the teenager himself credits Ake with being a guiding figure over the past seven days as they have played on the same side of defence. Advertisement City’s activity in the transfer market is likely to dictate exactly how much Alleyne is called upon at first-team level until the end of the season, and while a supporting role may not help his development quite as much as another five months in the Championship, his mindset will certainly fit in with Guardiola’s ‘no bad faces’ policy, where he demands that those not in the starting XI help their team-mates as much as possible. “If he’s not playing, he’ll be disappointed, but he won’t sulk, ” Mark says. “He will try to do his best on the bench, whatever he can do to be supportive. ” With the potential for a key role at City suddenly up for grabs, these could be exciting times for Alleyne and his family, not that you would expect any of them to be thinking far beyond the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg away to Newcastle United tonight (Tuesday). Sam Lee is the Manchester City correspondent for The Athletic. The 2024-25 campaign will be his 10th following the club, having previously held other positions with Goal and the BBC, and freelancing in South America. Follow Sam on Twitter @Sam Lee