Frank Lampard, the manager who brought Dwight McNeil to Everton this summer acknowledged in his pre-match press conference that “Improvement doesn’t happen in a straight line” and his words will be particularly poignant for the winger as Manchester United – the club where he spent almost a decade as a youngster – visit Goodison Park. The 22-year-old – who netted his first goal for the Blues to secure a 2-1 comeback victory at Southampton last weekend – is used to bouncing back in the face of adversity, establishing himself as a Premier League footballer at Burnley having been let go by his boyhood club when he was 14 and then earning his big £20million transfer to Merseyside on the back of relegation last season with the Clarets.
While McNeil’s father Matty, 46, a 6ft 5in centre-forward, was a professional player himself, turning out for a variety of lower division and non-League clubs across his native north west, the future Everton player reveals he also had some childhood heroes beyond the confines of the football pitch. A fan of the Marvel comic book characters, he likes Spiderman (he cites Tobey Maguire as his favourite) while he was also a fan of the singer Juice Wrld and it’s from one of the quotes from the late US rapper – famed for his association with the number 999, an inversion of 666 – that McNeil draws particular inspiration.
He said: “999 represents making whatever bad situation or whatever struggle you’re going through and turning it into something positive to push yourself forward.” Asked if it related to his release from Manchester United, McNeil said: “Yes, obviously it relates to life and I relate it to my life and also to football. I use this a lot, it reminds me.
“If you go to my career last year I struggled, last season I struggled a lot. Now this season it’s starting to come better, I keep trying to find ways to push forward and to become better within myself.”
Having been at Manchester United from the age of just five, McNeil still remembers the day that he was released from their youth academy. He said: “We trained and then the mums and dads had the meetings (with the coaches) and they told me on the way home in the car that I was released. They gave me an option to stay to the end of the year and help you look for other clubs but we just decided it was best to leave completely.
“My parents mainly just wanted to make sure I was alright. There was no pressure if I didn’t want to play, it was my choice.
“They said: ‘We’ll let you decide what you want to do and we’ll just be there to support.’”
However, rather than having his fledgling career ended prematurely, McNeil now looks back on that decision as being the pivotal moment that made him, even though it felt like a huge setback at the time as a United fan. Few of his contemporaries from that year group ended up making the grade in the first team with full-back Brandon Williams the only one still at the club and the one-time attacking midfield prospect Angel Gomes – the club’s youngest player since Duncan Edwards and first footballer born in the 2000s to appear in the Premier League, now turning out in France for Lille.
Offered a second chance at either Burnley or Blackburn Rovers, he chose the former and signed for them after a successful six-week trial period and said: “For the first two weeks it was hard for me to take. But going to Burnley was kind of [a sense of] freedom, a place to go and try and enjoy my football.
“Going from a Category One [Academy] to a Category Three helped me massively because while the quality wasn’t as good the other side of the game was a lot more physical, people were faster, stronger, more running, and a lot more on the tactical side of the game.
“At the time I knew a lot of on the ball stuff but going to Burnley helped me massively learn about the other side of the game, running back and defending and tactics defensively. It made me a more all-round player.
“I didn’t care where I played I just wanted to play football at the end of the day, playing football was all I ever wanted to do and all I knew at that age and growing up was just football. So getting released was hard to take at 14 but I look back on it now and don't have any regrets.”
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Burnley’s venture into Europa League football in 2018/19 – having seen off a challenge from Sam Allardyce’s Everton to secure seventh place in the Premier League the previous season – prompted manager Sean Dyche to use a bigger squad and a teenage McNeil was given his chance in the senior side at Turf Moor. He said: “It was Burnley’s Europa League season and I was with them full-time. When they moved me into the first team changing room when I was 17 I was like ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing here.’
“What happened so fast in a short space of time, I never really thought about it, I just thought about getting better. Being so young, training with the first team, I think helped me massively as well.
“I was training with the first team but playing for the Under-23s. Then in the midweeks that season was when Sean Dyche changed the team a little bit and gave me my chance and now I’m here.”
McNeil’s parents have continued to follow their son on every step of his football journey with his personal progress naturally taking priority over previous affinities to Old Trafford. The Everton man acknowledges that his dad has always been a United fan but he hasn’t necessarily been passing much comment on the club’s fortunes of late.
He said: “To be fair I don’t think he’s really been focused on it because he’s been supporting what I’ve been doing.” One thing that the Blues winger’s dad does have a say on though is his lad’s on-the-pitch displays.
McNeil said: “Growing up with my dad, watching him when I was young, he said it was my decision whether I wanted to play or not, he didn’t really force it on me. If I didn’t want to play, I didn’t want to play.
“At first I’d go and watch him but I knew that I just wanted to play myself. Then he’s guided me over the years with the training that he has given me, and now he still comes to every home and away game, he’s still there.
“He always says what I could have done better first, then praises me over what I’ve done well.” But does McNeil accept the constructive criticism?
He said: “Yes, sometimes. As I’ve got older, I’ve got wiser and I don’t mind having a bit of confrontation with him.
“He’s my dad, I am going to listen at the end of the day. I owe both my parents a lot for all those years, every training session and every game they were there and they are now.”
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