The pressure put on young players at Manchester United is enormous.
The club may not pump out prospects quite like Barcelona's famous La Masia but the Old Trafford side boasts a remarkable legacy nonetheless.
Flash back to the class of 92 and it feels as though expectations have gone out the window since. Every young prospect to don the famous red and white of United hopes to follow in those illustrious footsteps and is expected to do so.
However, as many who have gone before will tell those in the ranks now, life isn't that simple.
One poignant story is Ravel Morrison's. Once thought to be ahead of Paul Pogba "by a country mile" by Wayne Rooney, he is now plying his trade in Major League Soccer with DC United.
Federico Macheda was branded the next Cristiano Ronaldo, only to find himself in Turkish football years after that goal against Aston Villa.
Even Darron Gibson found himself compared to Paul Scholes. A successful career may well have been forged but he never reached the dizzy heights expected.
Another cautionary tale is that of Phil Jones. He may not have passed through the walls of the academy at Carrington, but as a young player his career petered out and he never lived up to his immense potential.
How much did Man United sign Phil Jones for?
The central defender arrived from Blackburn Rovers in the summer of 2011 in a deal worth £16m.
Jones was handed a five-year contract by Sir Alex Ferguson who once again had poached one of England's finest talents away from a fellow Premier League side.
The aforementioned price tag happened to be Jones' release clause. Coincidentally, there was also interest from Liverpool, but it was Old Trafford where the centre-back would end up.
Later that summer, David De Gea became another of Sir Alex's additions, to emphasise just how long the pair ended up remaining in north west.
What was said about Phil Jones when he first signed for Man United?
Jones' time at United initially started off brightly with rave reviews seemingly around every corner. An England U21 international at the time, he would end up winning his first senior cap for the Three Lions in the same year he signed, 2011.
That was the first of 27 caps, but it should have been so much more for a player Ferguson rated as highly as some of his greatest-ever players.
Speaking in 2013 after Jones' first and last Premier League trophy, Fergie remarked that he could "be our [Man United's] best ever player." It wasn't often that the Scot got things as wrong as that.
He can take solace in the fact that he wasn't the only one to see remarkable potential in Jones, now aged 31.
Shortly after signing, Gary Neville wrote in one column that “has a touch of Bryan Robson or Roy Keane” while Fabio Capello even mentioned him in the same breath as Franco Baresi and Fernando Hierro.
Perhaps the best compliment came from Sir Bobby Charlton who suggested the former Blackburn man was like Duncan Edwards of the Busby Babes.
How, therefore, did it all go so wrong?
Where is Phil Jones now?
Jones played 29 times in the Premier League during his debut season with the club but would never make more appearances than that throughout a single season again.
17 outings were made in the title-winning campaign of 2012/13 and 26 in 2013/14. Several seasons of being a rotational option followed before injuries well and truly got in his way.
The once-promising defender's final campaign where he got a look in came throughout 2018/19 where he featured on 18 occasions in the top flight.
Since then, however, Jones has only been seen six times in the league, and not at all since the 2021/22 campaign.
That was largely owed to a horrible run of injuries. 22 separate incidents were tallied up while he was a United player, which saw him miss a staggering 253 matches.
Despite such rotten luck, a period that saw him and his spell with the club labelled a "nightmare" by PA's Simon Peach, he still earned a new deal in 2019.
That came to an end this year with the veteran now currently without a club.
For someone who was thought of so highly, it's a great shame that such fine potential was never reached. Life and indeed football is often filled with plenty of what ifs. For Jones, it will very much be a case of what if he'd stayed fit. The England international may not have lived up to Ferguson's prophecy a decade ago, but a fine career may have still been forged.
