Just as well, then, that this particular 21- year-old, with fewer than 50 starts in senior football, is such a grounded lad as well as such a highly regarded prospect. Ask about his socialising at a (football) club where a night out with Rio, Rooney and the boys tends to end up on the front pages and he sounds insulted: "You won't see me out on the town very much unless it's a special occasion, a team-bonding session or something. Football these days, there's that many games, you've got to be preparing and getting your rest."
Any reports of Jack-the-laddishness would certainly go down as badly back home in Maybank as in the manager's office. It was there, in a working-class district of Edinburgh, that Fletcher was born and his love of football bred. "My roots are still firmly with me. When I go back home I'm still just the same Darren they see in the streets. My family still live in the same place where I grew up, playing football all the time - in from school, out playing, days off out all day, come back for lunch and dinner, that's all I can remember from my boyhood."
Plus, a little later, having a season ticket to watch Celtic and his particular heroes, Paolo Di Canio and Pierre van Hooijdonk, from whom he wisely appears to have derived talent rather than temperament. "They played some wonderful football with Tommy Burns as manager, who I was fortunate to work for with Scotland later. But Rangers kept beating us so I never actually saw many trophies."
Signing for his favourite club at an early age might have been considered the obvious thing to do, but a steely, stubborn and ambitious streak attracted him to English football at an early age, despite a rule that Scottish lads could not join clubs south of the border until they were 16. It is something that he believes handicaps the development of young Scottish talent. "I first came to United just for training when I was 12, and then every school holiday I was always down and loved every minute of it. But it was quite a difficult time, I actually don't agree with the whole process. You have to be patient and confident in your ability, so when you get to 16 you're still going to be able to go to an English club.
"A lot of young kids have the pressures of signing for a Scottish club at 12 or 14. For a Scot to wait until he's 16 before he can come down to an English club is terrible. Facilities in Scotland are nowhere near up to the standard of the English academies, so that's a disadvantage for a start. But I always wanted to play in the Premiership."
Sadly, the story that he was won over with a game of snooker chez Ferguson is a Manchester myth; no persuasion was ever going to be necessary. What is more firmly rooted in fact is the extraordinary tale that the manager wanted to use him as a 16-year-old in an end-of-season game at Aston Villa when the 1999-2000 championship was already won. But there was a complication with his registration and he had to settle for travelling with the squad.
Never mind walking into the first-team dressing room; even signing for the European champions just after their Treble season might have been considered sufficiently daunting to have worried any teenager less than completely sure of himself. Fletcher, although softly spoken, has a quiet confidence that remains on the right side of arrogance, and the manager's faith gently reinforced it. "I think in my year there were 12 of us under-17s, and you always know you're not all going to make it. But you've just got to be confident in your own ability, which I am, give it your best shot, be dedicated enough not to be drawn to the bright lights of Manchester and stuff like that. So if I failed, though I never contemplated failure, I could always say I gave it my best shot."
It has not all been plain sailing. In that first summer, he broke a foot representing Scotland's Under-16s in a tournament that controversially took place on artificial pitches. The same problem kept recurring, and he played only one game in the whole season. A scrawny physique worried some of the coaches while he was still growing, but he has won them over: "I've learnt how to use my body, though I'm not the strongest-looking. We've got a professional weights person who comes in and he was always saying, 'We need to get you into the gym'. When you're injured you have hockey matches against the staff, and he came to me after one of them and said he didn't realise how strong I was, the couple of times I was holding him off. It showed you don't have to look strong to be strong."