Manchester United's version of Hogwarts continues to ready future stars (2024)

“Marcus Rashford scored two goals on his debut, but he still came into school on the Monday,” says Tarun Kapur CBE, chief executive head of the Dean Trust whose schools include Ashton on Mersey where young Manchester United footballers have attended, Rashford included, since 1998.

Kapur is also a long-time Old Trafford season ticket holder from Stretford. “I always go to see the post-16 boys on a Monday morning, talk a bit of football and have a chat. I saw Marcus that day and said, ‘Why are you in? The first team have been given a few days off… you scored two goals at the weekend’. Marcus looked at me nonchalantly and said: ‘All my friends are here. I live across the road. And I can’t drive. So I may as well come in and do my work’. He was top class.”

With 1,425 mixed pupils aged 11-18, Ashton is a successful state academy school in Trafford, which has some of the best state schools in England. Ashton’s last two Ofsted reports have been “Outstanding” in 2013 and “Good” in 2020.

“It’s a good school,” agrees defender Axel Tuanzebe. “I was 14 when I moved there (from Rochdale, 10 miles north of Manchester). They encouraged me to knuckle down and do well in school. You need that when you’re not in school as much as the other pupils because you train every day. Footballers want to focus on football, but education is important. The teachers were so willing at Ashton to help us develop.

“I had a few A*s, a few As, a few Bs at GCSE level. I could have done A-levels, but I’d turned professional as a footballer and there wouldn’t have been the time.”

Anthony Elanga, a Swede who is United’s current young player of the year, is equally complimentary. “The teachers were very helpful. If they knew we were behind on coursework because we’d been training, they’d stay behind and help us. School usually finished at 3 but we stayed an extra hour and that was important to me. I’m academic.”

“What Ashton on Mersey does for us is enable us to have a small number of players who are educated with our partner school,” explains Nick Cox, head of United’s academy. “Boys leave school at 16 and after that we can train with them every day and give them an experience which is close to being a first-team experience. They can relocate to the area. But between 12-16, boys are training with associated academies on a part-time basis and that brings about a number of challenges. Boys have to spend hours in cars travelling backwards and forwards every night. They may miss bits of education. They may get home late at night and run out of time to do their homework. There’s no synergy between their football development and their education. If they live in the local area, we can dovetail their academic programme with their football development programme and remove as many of those barriers as possible.”

It’s a successful, long-standing partnership that has resulted in players being educated and maintaining contact with the school and the digs where they lived, going back to the 1990s.

“We became a sports college in 1997 and I signed an agreement with Alex Ferguson and (United chairman) Martin Edwards,” Kapur tells The Athletic. “Dave Bushell from United was there too.”

Bushell is the former manager of England Schoolboys and has worked with young United players for over 25 years. He looked at several private and state schools and decided that Ashton was the best option for the club — and not just because of the geography of it being close to the site where Carrington was going to be built. Bushell felt the people at Ashton understood flexible learning — and football. Several teachers were semi-professional footballers themselves. Bushell still calls the school his best signing for United.

“If you want to compare a state and private school, then a state one will cater for the needs of everyone of our learners,” says Cox. “Not every one of our players is cut out for a private education, but Ashton can ramp up their programme for the most academic players. State school is real life, there’s a wholesome, rough-and-tumble feel to it and a normal childhood. We want our boys to be humble, but to be childlike too. We want them to be grounded and to have an authentic childhood. And if we have kids who get into mischief and push boundaries, then we don’t mind that. If you have the family working together, you have a better chance of a young person reaching their full potential – and all the people at that school are passionate about young people.”

That passion remains long after their charges have left.

“When we open the newspapers on a Sunday, we don’t look at Man United, but at every club where our ex-students are plying their trade,” says Kapur. “Chongy (Tahith Chong) went across to Germany. If you look at the United teamsheet for a League Cup game it can look like an Ashton on Mersey school team.”

United’s recruits cannot play for the actual school team, but their football obsession is always there.

“We mentor our boys to do things which are not football, but whether we like it or not, they still go and do what they’re not supposed to do and play football at lunch with their friends… because that’s what they do!” laughs Kapur. “Mason Greenwood and some of the current boys — it’s brilliant to see their talent. They can’t play for the school team, but the others love it and copy them. Their mates give them stick and the players have to accept that.”

Kapur reveals that interactions between the non-footballing students and the footballers are interesting.

“They don’t have people asking for autographs every day at school. Maybe some of the girls in sixth form put a bit of extra make-up on a Monday, but the boys don’t get hassle. Yet even if they do get hassle, we can put a lid on it straight away. I don’t mind them making mistakes with us either. If they’re under 16 then they’re schoolboys first and foremost. The club are brilliant and agree that if the boys don’t do their work then they don’t play. This means they get better results than they would have had they not been a footballer, because they have the motivation to do what they need to do.

“Sir Alex was vicious in terms of saying, ‘They will do what they are told in school’. He came to see us on a regular basis, he wanted to put something back into the school.

“We had some disappointments but we made the best of them. Ravel Morrison came to us at sixth form and he was a challenge because his schooling previously wasn’t with us and there hadn’t been enough of it. We decided to do something different with him and he went with Dave Law (director of sport and heavily involved with nearby Trafford FC). Ravel loved being around young people who wanted to play football, be our demonstrator and role model. When he left, he asked if he could come back and play more football. We looked at what he could do, rather than tell him off for what he couldn’t.”

Law’s own daughter Abigail met one of the Ashton boys, Italian defender and FA Youth Cup winner Michele Fornasier.

“They’re married with boys of their own. Mickey has played in Italy with Pescara, Venezia, Parma, Trapani and now Cremonese. He’s remained close friends with Paul Pogba from their time at school and at United.”

“Paul Pogba is one of ours, too” Kapur points out. “A confident, jovial student who walked around school like he walks around the pitch. He was exceptionally respectful. Gerard Pique and Giuseppe Rossi came together. Because of their culture, they would come in and shake my hand and have a chat. Now we have more players like this. They’re more respectful, they’re far more savvy in terms of understanding what is expected from them. They understand the difference between right and wrong and what they can and cannot do.”

Kapur and his staff are proud of all the lads who’ve done well, with Marcus Rashford unsurprisingly among the students remembered most fondly.

“Marcus is a great example of what he is doing with schools meals and that’s not a surprise to us,” he says. “We had Marcus from the age of 12. He was in our programme with 14 or 15 boys, basically the best players. Mason Greenwood came through that, Scott McTominay, Brandon Williams, Axel Tuanzebe and Jesse Lingard, who was deputy head boy at the school. Jesse had to be interviewed for that role and got it. All the boys will come back and do presentation evenings for us, but they’ve long been part of our establishment. They’re generous with their time, they bring boots to be raffled.”

Before the Ashton partnership, players went to Accrington College, an hour north of Manchester. Initially, Law says, they were all British and Irish kids. “Luke Chadwick, Danny Higginbotham, Paul Rachubka made it from the first group. There was a Welsh lad called Wayne Evans who was a wonderful choir singer. He didn’t sing at school, it wasn’t very good for his street cred. The young professionals would only attend on a Monday morning and all day Thursday.

“The boys came from a large cross-section of British society. At one end you had a boy like Jonny Evans who was a genius in academic terms. He got all As in his GCSE exams, including four A*s. John O’Shea was very bright and Darren Fletcher was fantastic. Darren made his debut against Basel in the Champions League. He didn’t sleep all night and came to school looked shocking, really pale. I stopped PE and he told kids about his experience the night before. They were all in awe at that moment, but Darren was always down-to-earth and still is.”

Kapur reveals proudly that Evans was the top-performing student in the whole school who got the equivalent of four As in his A-Levels. “He came here with his brother Corry and their father asked how he’d do. They’d been at a good school in Belfast. I said they would do great because they were joining an outstanding school.

“Jonny was studious, he treated people as he’d like to be treated and that’s how it should be. One of our jobs is to let players make mistakes in schools.”

Several goalkeepers, including West Brom’s Sam Johnstone, went to the school and Kapur has good words about them.

“Tom Heaton was a top-class person. I still see him. Paul Rachubka, another goalkeeper, was a very intelligent lad. He came in to see us recently. Most of the players do a sports science course or a business studies course which is the equivalent of two A-levels. If Marcus wanted to go to university he could do that as he has the grades. Some boys who don’t make it as footballers do go to university or they get a scholarship in America, where the standard is lower but they can earn.”

Former alumni also include ex-sprinter Darren Campbell and comedians Karl Pilkington and Chris Sievey (aka Frank Sidebottom).

“Our influence on the boys is 10-20 per cent, but it might be the most important influence because we give them structure outside of football,” explains Kapur. “Footballers have too much free time, so some of our boys do additional work outside of the usual study slots if they want to achieve more.”

Cox, formerly of Watford and Sheffield United, gives the club’s perspective on what they hope to achieve for the boys in their academy and how the recruitment has changed from the early days of its link with the school.

“We want it to be full of predominantly local players who represent the local area and a football club should represent its community,” says Cox. “Our best youth teams have had that core and we want players to understand the culture of the club, the history, the standards so that they can then inform and educate the players who arrive on the journey a little later on who arrive from further afield.

“But when you have a first team wanting to compete at Champions League level, you have to look well beyond Manchester for talent. Because of who we are, we can attract these players. We can cater for players from far and wide and bring in outstanding talents who are going to do things and innovate in a different way. Mix them with the local lads and it’s a nice mix of talent.”

Rules allow clubs like United to look outside their catchment area at 14.

“We could bring a boy who would stay with a host family and the boy can go to Ashton on Mersey,” explains Cox. “Dave Bushell and (coach and fellow mentor) Tony Whelan have created a community just around the corner from the training ground — a home from home for the boys.”

“We also put the boys with great families, many of them parents of pupils or former pupils,” adds Kapur. “They look after them as if they are still their own children. Staff move on but the relationship between the club and the school hasn’t changed and we’ve been able to get on with it and carry on helping the club produce players. We add reality to their lives, ground them and they get a telling off if they need one. They’re not superstars here. At some of the other clubs where they’ve sent players to a school, they’re stuck together as a clique and don’t mix with other students. That is damaging to the school and also to the player.”

Now, 22 years on, United and Ashton on Mersey are very happy with their partnerships.

“It’s about relationships,” says Kapur. “I still talk to players and they remember fondly their time here. I don’t say school or college. I’m staff at the club and the club are staff when they come here.”

Unlike most things associated with Manchester United, the partnership is low key. That’s how both parties like it.

As Bushell says, signing up the school has proved to be one of the best things United have done over more than two decades and what it has given the students who attend is priceless for both their football and personal lives.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)