Middlesbrough FC product plans to learn from old club after stumbling into job as York City's director of football

McMahon was given the job title last week, though in reality he has been doing it all summer after being diverted from the coaching duties which brought him to the club under Mikey Morton.

The job has surprised him.

"To be honest, I stumbled into it,” he says. "In the summer the owners asked me to help them out and use my contacts in the game to help.

"It was all new to me. In the summer I remember making phone calls on holiday when I'm normally away relaxing but I was doing ins and outs, speaking to agents, some of them probably pointless phone calls where nothing really came of it but it was what I had to do.

"We are in much better shape, we got the outs and ins we want."

Slimming a bloated squad and adapting it to manager Adam Hinshelwood's needs was vital. The proof is in four wins and two draws from the first seven Conference games, a run they will aim to extend at home to Braintree on Tuesday.

Although only 38, McMahon has plenty of experience to call on, not least of how a good academy looks after coming through Middlesbrough's at arguably its peak as FA Youth Cup-winning captain.

"We want to get players through our academy into our first team and I was quite lucky to come through a good academy so Middlesbrough's an easy one to pick up the phone to," said McMahon, who also made over 100 appearances for Bradford City and had spells with both Sheffield clubs.

"I'm due to go up there and sit down with their director of football, Kieran Scott, and hopefully I can pick up a few ideas from him.

"Some players I know have gone into the role and I've spoken to a lot of them in recent weeks.

"I'm new to the role but keen to learn. I go into it with open eyes.

"If we could get a conveyor belt of youngsters coming through our academy that would be brilliant, wouldn't it? It would save the club a lot of money as well.

"This is a long-term project. As a management and owners we've all got ambitions and I don't think there's any ceiling for the club but we did have to have a little reset in the summer.

"This is just the start of hopefully something good. We've got a manager everyone's hopefully behind who plays a style of play everyone's enjoying, and players the manager wants to play that style of play.

"We're in a much better place to move forward and there's a real positivity about everyone associated with York City.

"There hasn't been much over the last couple of seasons because we've been down at the bottom but we've started this season at the right end and if we can keep progressing I'm sure that counts as success but the end goal for all of us is to be a Football League club."

Darragh O'Connor missed training on Monday. Cameron John is fit again after a heavy workload and Dipo Akinyemi has recovered from a sickness bug.