🔗 Share this article

What do you enhance a outstanding experienced team who have claimed back-to-back championships, featuring a double triumph with thirty wins from 32 matches?

Sign a collection of ex- pro players who have competed at the highest level of club and global football as you aim for additional honors.

A Greater Manchester side boasts an non-professional veterans squad with 9 former top-flight footballers in their current lineup.

222 Top Division Goals, 325 Global Caps

Wythenshawe Veterans Over 35s are situated in southern Manchester and compete in the Cheshire Veterans Division Top Tier.

The squad list this season features 9 ex- Premier League footballers, with a total nearly 1,800 Premier League matches.

The high-profile squad also boasts 222 Premier League goals and over 320 global appearances.

They feature Papiss Cisse, who netted thirty-seven goals in 117 games for his former club after moving to them for nine million pounds from Bundesliga side SC Freiburg in January 2012.

He had his first appearance for the team in their last home-field game versus defending champions Collegiate Old Boys and scored every one of the six scores in a six-two win - featuring a 32-minute first-half hat-trick.

Wythenshawe's team for this season also includes ex- professionals such as England and Anfield forward Emile Heskey, Hull City and Burnley midfielder George Boyd, Everton forward Oumar Niasse, Wigan full-back Maynor Figueroa, Manchester City pair Stephen Ireland and Nedum Onuoha and top-flight title victors Joleon Lescott and Danny Drinkwater.

Collectively, the ex- top-flight footballers have won fifteen major trophies and transferred for total transfer sums of approximately £123m.

Famous Figures and Global Players

Ireland began turning out for the team during pre-season this season through close friend and present Wythenshawe player Blake Norton, and the ex- Irish player then asked other former professionals, who all compete in a weekly nine-a-side match, to join in.

Former Senegalese striker Niasse, who scored 12 goals in sixty-five Premier League matches for the Toffees and even now attends their matches at Goodison Park, also made his debut against Collegiate OB - who are based in Liverpool and use an Everton training kit as their strip.

"My friend Stephen Ireland told me 'join and play, it's enjoyable'," said the striker.

"After that he informed me we were playing a side from Liverpool and the shock I had when I noticed them wearing Everton shirts - I thought this is strange for me!

"When you still enjoy the game and you feel you can still play, wherever you can kick a ball, what are you going to choose?

"Those fans who come and see are pleased and to give someone's moment if they see us playing there and to pose us queries - it's more like the pleasure of us having a place we can play, with structure of course."

Such is the squad depth at the club, Niasse made his first game at defender.

"That's a bit unusual but then, I love sprinting and just go forward - I'm not defending that much," he added.

"I warn my centre-back 'I'm not hanging back' and that I'm just going to keep attacking.

"That running is what I'm after. It's enjoyable."

Unreal Feeling

In addition to the forward's 6 goals on debut, Stephen Ireland has scored 8 in 3 games for Wythenshawe, while George Boyd scored 5 on his debut appearance and Joleon Lescott, a defender by trade, notched a triple in one game as a striker.

The team are top of the Top Division with 3 wins from 3 and a goal difference of plus nineteen.

Paul Barrow, 38, who features on the flank for Collegiate OB, faced former Latics full-back Maynor Figueroa on the weekend - and had to tell his nine-year-old boy who Emile Heskey was.

Figueroa has played at 2 World Cups for his country, in as well as playing in more than two hundred top-flight matches.

"It was going round like wildfire they had all these ex-Premier League players," said the player.

"I felt I was a bit starstruck facing Figueroa to be honest.

"Even Emile [Heskey] got on and he's got 60-odd England caps.

"Our side held our own for a good twenty minutes but then we had a man dismissed and it was hard.

"We literally have not ceased chatting about it - I was phoning my mum and sibling on the way home.

"The opponents were all really nice, shaking our hands after the game - it was like facing a group of regular fellas.

"Now we are eager for the return match."

We Will Still Take the League'

The manager coaches the opposition vets team, who won the Top Tier title last season, along with Paul Maguire.

"We went 1-0 ahead and had a