sport news PHIL FODEN on the very personal reason why he wears No 47, how he deals with ... trends now

Some footballers like to turn their heads away from history, the challenges it presents and the pressure it brings. Phil Foden doesn’t think that way. He wants to walk towards it.

For Foden and Manchester City, a shot at a Champions League defence and a successive treble have gone, ground into the dirt by Real Madrid’s refusal to buckle during an epic Etihad night on Wednesday.

But at City when one door closes, there is always another one to walk through. And for Foden and his team-mates a reminder of what remains possible over the next five weeks is writ large on the wall every time they lace up their boots.

‘We understand it here,’ Foden says.

‘We know if we win the Premier League this time we will have done something new. It’s something we have our eyes on.

‘Every time we put our boots on at the training ground that saying is there on the wall.

‘It says: “Nobody has won four Premier Leagues in a row…yet”.

‘We want to put ourselves in history.

‘Every day I sit and look at that slogan and I think: “Why not?”.’

The last time Foden sat down with Mail Sport was almost five years ago. Foden was 18 and the football world was talking about why City manager Pep Guardiola didn’t play him more or at least send him out on loan. Foden himself, just eighteen months after his first team debut, was less preoccupied with all that. Beset by imposter syndrome – a former City ball boy in a changing room full of world stars – he told me he had to stop himself asking Kevin de Bruyne for autographs every time he turned up for work.

Foden was a kid back then. Probably the most talented kid in England but a kid just the same. That day he agreed to jump into a ball pit for our photographer. This week he laughed at that memory. It seems faintly ridiculous now and that’s because it is. Because now Foden, a father of two, is arguably the most important player in Guardiola’s team, the scorer of big goals and the owner of important moments. Manchester United. Real at the Bernabeu. It doesn’t matter who the opposition is.

Foden gets nervous before some big games. ‘Butterflies in my stomach when I get to the stadium and I know it’s on,’ he says. But they disappear once the game starts. ‘That first touch of the ball and I know I am in my home,’ he nods.

Foden is still a young man. He is not 24 until next month. But as a sportsman he is all grown up. He is favourite to win this season’s Player of the Year honours and Gareth Southgate will rely on him when England get to Germany for the European Championships. Foden, Bellingham, Saka, Kane. No wonder the rest of Europe is nervous.

So we see him differently now. The questions have been answered. They are being answered. Guardiola was right all along. Who would have thought it?

‘It’s been hard sometimes, you know, being the City fan who was a ball boy and then making it through the levels to the first team,’ Foden explains.

‘I don’t think it will ever really change you know? A little bit of that feeling is always gonna be there. But I have balance now. Maybe it’s finally gone this year, I don’t know.

‘The challenge for me was always a mountain to climb to even reach the first team. In my head I just wanted to make one appearance for this club and be able to say that I had done it.

‘But once I did that I thought: “No I can actually play here. I can handle the standard”.

‘Now I am at that stage where I feel like I am a key player in the team. I feel very comfortable with that.’

The house where Foden grew up stands on a street corner a beefy free-kick away from Stockport County’s home at Edgeley Park.

It is to this house that Foden returned holding a business card at the age of just six. It had been given to him at his school by a football scout called Terry John who had visited looking for talent. He had watched Foden dribble a ball round some comes and reckoned the kid had something.

As we talk and then do some filming for Mail Sport’s social media channels at City’s training ground this week, John stands quietly in the corner. He is Foden’s business manager now. Foden has always kept his circle tight and says he always will.

‘I have known Terry all my life,’ Foden says.

‘It’s important to keep people there who have been on your journey. Luckily he came in that day to school. Had he not, I don’t know where I would be right now.

‘It’s hard, you know. There are a lot of people who suddenly want to be part of your life who didn’t know you before you become famous.

‘I have always tried to keep down to earth and the people I have around me haven’t changed. I have a small group and that’s the way I like it.’

Foden’s journey through the City age groups was rapid. It began seven miles from home at the club’s old Platt Lane facility, close to Manchester’s famous curry mile in Rusholme. It’s owned by the university now.

‘It was an education,’ smiles Foden.

‘We had to wait for community groups to finish on the pitches before we could even get on.

‘But I wouldn’t change it. It was where I learned my craft.

‘I just wanted to have a ball at my feet. Then I was happy. Playing with older boys helped me handle the ball in tight areas and use my physicality.

‘When I eventually reached the first team, it was like being a kid again. You know, I was back to being the smallest. I remembered everything I had been taught as a kid and simply transferred it in to the first team. It felt just the same.’

Once the talent was established and the road to prominence mapped out, it was on to his club’s modern City Football Academy, the sprawling 16-pitch facility across the dual carriageway from the Etihad Stadium.

On his Instagram account, there is a wonderful photograph of Foden training with the City first team for the first time in 2016. He has the ball – of course he has – while Sergio Aguero and Yaya Toure lurk nearby. At 16-years-old, he is a boy to their man in every conceivable way.

‘That photo makes me very proud,’ Foden says.

‘Sharing that changing room was a real big moment.

‘I remember going into the Rondo [where a player in the middle of a circle tries to intercept passes made from one side to the other] for the first time and just thinking: “Oh wow. How am I gonna reach that level?”

‘That Rondo… you just weren’t getting the ball. You were stuck in there in the middle for about ten minutes. But then, as time wore on, you learn to move the ball a bit quicker, just like they do.’

There is a myth in the blue half of Manchester about Foden and his brief spell as a City ball boy. It says that he was the one who threw the ball back for the corner that led to Edin Dzeko’s equaliser against QPR as City rescued a lost cause to win the 2012 Premier League.

‘No, it’s not true,’ laughs Foden.

‘I was actually behind that goal in the crowd with my mum. At the end we were on the pitch with everybody else.

‘It was the biggest thing to happen in the club’s history. Without that Aguero goal we

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