We spent the day with Sunday league team full of former Premier League players

It is a cold but bright Sunday morning in south Manchester and Wythenshawe Over-35s are about to kick off at home to South Liverpool in the Cheshire Vets League Premier Division. But this is no ordinary Sunday league scene. A crowd of about 800 have flocked to the Avensure Community Stadium, the club shop, bar and catering facilities are almost overrun and you need only look at the Lamborghinis, Range Rovers and Mercedes G-Wagons in the car park to get the sense that something a little different is unfolding.

In a packed dressing room, Kieran Megran, the Wythenshawe Vets manager, reads out the starting line-up and instructs his players to “move the ball quickly, get it into the forwards and have runners off them”.

“If we do that in the first 10 or 15 minutes,” he adds, “the game will be done.”

Cissé, relishing the banter, cracks a smile as South Liverpool’s player-manager Hilel Alkanshaly also joins in the fun. “He missed his penalty and I was having a little word in his ear, getting in his head – I thought we had him!” Alkanshaly jokes afterwards. “And then his tricks of the trade came out, didn’t they?”

Wythenshawe’s galaticos adventure is just four league games old, but already they are sitting pretty at the top of the table after scoring 36 goals. They were pretty good last season, winning 30 of 32 games en route to lifting the league title, but defeats in two cup finals persuaded one of their players, Blake Norton, to pick up the phone to his friend Ireland, the former Manchester City midfielder, in search of a little extra cutting edge.

“I came off the pitch annoyed after losing the Lancashire Cup final to Bamber Bridge and started messaging Stevie – ‘You need to play for us’ – and it just snowballed from there,” explains Norton, who used to play for the likes of Altrincham and Droylsden in the old Football Conference.

Ireland had started a Tuesday night football game in the wake of the Covid pandemic lockdown that would quickly morph into just about the world’s best informal kickaround, now enjoyed by scores of former household names. So, in effect, there was a ready-made pool of top former professionals to pick from. “I joke with Stevie that it’s like going to a takeaway and being able to order off a menu - ‘Right, here’s what we’ve got available’,” says Megran. “I’m like ‘Who can we have?’ ‘You can have him, him, him and him’. I was watching some of these players when I was growing up. It’s surreal.”

Not every Sunday league manager is able to call Jefferson Montero, the former Swansea City striker and recipient of 64 caps for Ecuador, off their bench.

“It’s made my job a lot easier I’ve got admit,” Megran adds. “I was losing my hair last season screaming on the sidelines, but now I’m a bit more chilled out. I’ve never been in a situation like this before, so I’m going to run with it. I’m still annoyed at Papiss for missing that penalty, mind!”

Even Rooney has asked to come down and play

Ireland, who made 246 Premier League appearances for Manchester City, Aston Villa, Newcastle and Stoke City, and still looks in remarkably good shape at 39, admits he is being inundated with requests to play from a host of former Premier League stars. “My phone hasn’t stopped – ‘How do I get involved, how do I sign up?’” the former Ireland international says. “I’m just wary of not bringing in too many people because we want it to be a mix of the proper old vets with maybe four or five pros each time. But it’s great fun. We love it.”

Also registered and paying their £15 monthly subs are former Liverpool striker Emile Heskey, who played 62 times for England, former Manchester City defender and two-time Premier League title winner Joleon Lescott, Oumar Niasse, who cost Everton £13.5m nine years ago, and Nedum Onuoha, a veteran of 188 Premier League games for City and Queens Park Rangers.

Ireland reveals that former Manchester United and England captain Wayne Rooney has even been asked to come down to play and could yet feature in a team he hopes to take to Dublin early next month against a star-studded Irish side that Conor McGregor, the former UFC champion, is pulling together.

“Rooney in the No 10 slot, wouldn’t be bad that,” says Drinkwater, laughing. A Premier League title winner with Leicester City who subsequently joined Chelsea for £35m, Sunday was Drinkwater’s first outing for Wythenshawe and he loved every minute. “It’s obviously a massive contrast to playing in your heyday but, without sounding totally daft, there is still as much enjoyment in it.

“There’s loads of banter. I’m there chuckling away in the background. One of their lads tried megging me early on! He didn’t succeed, but then he misplaced a pass and it went through my bloody legs five minutes later and he said: ‘I told you to shut your legs!’”

Megran says the banter is relentless: “Chappy [Neil Chappell, the captain] gave Lescott some last week. Lescott fired back by telling him he’d won the Premier League – that shut Chappy down!”

Claire Barratt is busy selling club shirts, hoodies, hats and scarves in a cabin outside the main clubhouse and doing a roaring trade. The wife of Wythenshawe chairman Carl Barratt, she has been involved with the club for 23 years. “It’s been amazing to have these guys playing for our little club,” she says. “We’re so honoured.”

Ireland had opened the scoring with a smart volley before two goals from Boyd, the former Burnley and Hull City forward, gave Wythenshawe a 3-0 half-time lead. He had to be substituted early so he could dash off to coach his son’s under-12s team. But the game was effectively over as a contest when one of the South Liverpool players was rather harshly sent off for diving into a challenge on Ireland late in the first period. Was it a red card? “In these leagues, it’s a good tackle!” Ireland quipped.

Alkanshaly was unimpressed with the decision. “It spoilt the game for the professionals and it spoilt the game for the crowd,” he says. “It’s been made very evident that they are only playing the home games for Wythenshawe and everyone who comes here seems to get a man sent off. We thought that was a myth but... it’s something to look forward to, though, isn’t it? How many amateur players are going to play against that many former pro players?”

The visitors were briefly down to nine men late on when another player was sin-binned. When he was eventually allowed to return to the pitch, the away team chanced their arm by sticking two players back on. It took the referee a few minutes to notice. “We were just testing the ref to see if he was keeping his focus,” Alkanshaly joked.

By that stage, Cissé had already completed a double hat-trick thanks to the most nonchalant of angled lobs.

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