A carb-obsessed scientist who pioneered a dietary revolution in cycling is assisting Ineos’s so-called ‘Mission 21’ project to bring the Premier League title back to Manchester United.

James Morton, who also worked at Liverpool for five years, developed an ultra-disciplined ‘traffic-light system’ which dictated what Team Sky’s Tour de France winners were eating at all hours.

His methods have since been championed by nutritionists after he relied on research showing how restricting carbohydrates heavily helped glean better long-term outcomes.

“We therefore came up with that traffic-light system where we would change the carbohydrate at breakfast or on the bike or at lunch or in the evening meal, depending what the session looked like today, but also what did the session look like tomorrow and the day after,” he previously told an episode of the ‘Fuel the Pedal’ podcast.

“So fuel for the work required then really means adjusting your carbohydrate intake, day by day, made by meal in accordance with the upcoming workload.”

At United, Morton – who stood alongside Sir Dave Brailsford as they presented a ‘Mission 21’ blueprint to senior performance staff at Carrington late last year – is leaving day-to-day catering plans to the club’s nutritionists.

Instead, he has a wide-ranging strategic oversight role at Ineos supporting Brailsford, with the pair also detailing a ‘Mission 1’ project to deliver a first Women’s Super League title to the women’s team.

As first reported by The Times newspaper, ‘Mission 21’ and ‘Mission 1’ sit under United’s broader ‘Project 150’ initiative, presented by the chief executive, Omar Berrada, last autumn and linked to the club’s 150th anniversary in 2028. Berrada, Jason Wilcox and Collette Roche are all leading figures in Project 150.

Little has been known about the role being played by Morton, however, after he was spotted at Carrington several times in recent months. His background is as professor of exercise metabolism at Liverpool John Moores University, where he has authored more than 200 research publications related to sports physiology and nutrition.

Morton was also at Liverpool between 2010 to 2015 as performance nutritionist prior to the Jurgen Klopp era. However, he has repeatedly stated how his methods have developed significantly since he started working with Brailsford, initially as nutrition and physical performance lead for Team Sky between 2015 and 2019.

After leading nutrition strategy for five consecutive Tour de France wins, he switched to a senior oversight role at Ineos Sport, where he has “led the creation and delivery of the Ineos X programme that aims to share knowledge and best practice on leadership, coaching and performance support across the Ineos Sport portfolio”.

Morton’s “fuel for the work required” philosophy is known to have impressed Brailsford as success continued for the team.

“When you deliberately reduce your carbohydrate intake and adjust them for the amount of work that you need to do, then what happens inside the muscle is a whole host of molecular pathways that regulates how our muscle adapts to training, and you switch these pathways on when you restrict carbohydrate,” Morton said.

“So it’s almost like if you increase the stress of the training session by reducing the amount of carbohydrate, then actually the muscle senses that and adapts faster, and you get a greater training response even if you’ve performed the same type of training session,” he says.

As Brailsford leads the charge in implementing his famed “marginal gains” approach at United, Morton’s granular approach is cited by United insiders as an ideal fit.