Where will you find football’s heroes? Not in the pampered Premier League | Eric Allison

The billions spent on players and bloated wages never find their way to the sport’s true stars – those who toil for free at the grassroots

There’s a bee in my bonnet; about football and the fortunes currently flooding the top levels of the game. For my sins, I was brought up to follow Manchester United and occasionally I bore people by telling them this: when I first started going to Old Trafford, in the early 1950s, if I got the right buses to Old Trafford on match days, Roger Byrne, who played left back for United and England, would be on the same bus. We both lived in down-at-heel Gorton, east Manchester, before Roger and his family upgraded to a council house in posh Burnage. He was my first hero. I could relate to him, along with the rest of the Busby Babes who perished with Roger at Munich.

After several decades on the road, as it were, I moved back to Gorton 17 years ago. These days, I have new heroes in the game, having given up on the excesses of the Premier League a while back. I know times change, and I wouldn’t expect to share the same bus as the current football stars, but it would be nice to think we shared the same planet.

Related: Cheating is leeching sport of its magic. In the end, the fans won’t stand for it | Alastair Campbell

Where I live, the kids are still all football daft. But there are fewer public playing fields than when I was a nipper

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from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2vyUf1w