While most of the soccer world has its eyes glued to the World Cup, Harry Maguire is spending his summer with a GPS tracker strapped to his chest. Or at least one assigned to him by Manchester United.
The veteran defender, who was left out of Thomas Tuchel’s England squad for the tournament in the U.S., isn’t lounging around eating chips. Not that United would let him anyway.
Maguire guest-hosted on the podcast ‘Rest is Football’ this week and spilled some details on how the club keeps tabs on players who aren’t at the World Cup. According to the Manchester Evening News, he said United sends out a schedule and a GPS device to make sure guys are following their fitness programs.
“Man United send you a schedule, they send you a GPS to make sure that you’re doing it. Yeah, they keep on top of you,” Maguire said.
It’s not exactly Big Brother stuff. More like a club that spent most of the last decade in chaos finally deciding not to leave anything to chance. Michael Carrick has United looking like a real team again after they locked down third place in the Premier League and a Champions League spot. The former interim boss got the full-time gig and now he’s making sure his players don’t come back to camp looking like they spent six weeks at an all-inclusive in Cancún.
Maguire’s Summer Plans: Rest, Recover, Prove People Wrong Again
At 33, Maguire has been written off more times than most defenders see in a full career. He lost the captaincy under Erik ten Hag. His goodbye tour looked scheduled. Then Ruben Amorim showed up, then Carrick, and suddenly Maguire is back in the starting XI conversation.
He admitted the time off will be good for him. “I’ll have had six-and-a-half weeks off but then to be honest, the pre-season, I normally get about three weeks before the first game,” he said. That’s a long runway. But after the last 18 months he’s had — fighting back from the scrap heap to being a reliable piece again — a little extra rest probably isn’t the worst thing.
United open the season with a trip to Hull City before hosting Ipswich Town. Two winnable games. The kind of fixtures that let a team with title ambitions lay down an early marker. And if Maguire starts both matches with clean sheets, the narrative shifts again.
He’s done it before. No reason to think he won’t try again.
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