Thierry Henry doubts Anthony Martial will fulfil his potential at Manchester United

Former Arsenal and France striker Thierry Henry has revealed some concerns over whether Anthony Martial can genuinely fulfil his enormous potential at Manchester United.

The centre-forward has led the attack this term for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side, with Marcus Rashford out injured of late and playing from the left most frequently before that.

Despite scoring 16 in all competitions, there have been some who have criticised Martial for a perceived lack of consistency and decisive contributions in the biggest of games.

And Lee Dixon has revealed that Henry has concerns over Martial having the type of characters to look up to in the squad that he himself had at Arsenal as a youngster.

Dixon, who was a right-back in the Arsene Wenger side when Henry joined, spoke to the Handbrake Off podcast and revealed what Henry told him about Martial.

“’He’s exactly like I was when I came to Arsenal’,” Dixon recounted of Henry’s words.

“’He needs to go through the process like I did with you lot and I don’t know if the Manchester United dressing room is like that.’ He said that was the making of him.”

Dixon feels that Henry put a lot of emphasis on learning from experienced and demanding team-mates, which played a big role in how successful he became. The worry is, with United rebuilding and not having been successful of late, that Martial doesn’t have that type of character to learn from.

“To liken himself to Martial or another player to him, it really painted a picture of what Martial was like and what his character was like because he’s super-talented like Thierry was and I think his development would have been similar.

“I’m not saying he would have been as good as Thierry – but would have been similar if he had been in the old United dressing room with the characters like we had in our dressing room.

“He certainly talks about that as a real learning lesson in his curve to get how brilliant he was.”

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