Foden, Palmer, Mainoo: how did Stockport become a football talent factory?

By RM Clark

A tabby cat runs for shelter beneath a parked car as a delivery van pulls a U-Turn in the junction. The road is speed-bumped and pot-holed and lived-in, with rusted tufts of weeds shooting out through the gaps in the tarmac almost yellow, almost scorched, almost all that’s left of the almost summer that we almost had last week. There are short, stubby driveways and a dog in a high-vis jacket. The laddered tights of a family trampoline sag sadly in the wind, caught somewhere in the middle vision between the flightpath of Manchester Airport and the wild thickness of the hedgerows below. 

This is Mayfair Road, Wythenshawe. Cole Palmer used to kick a ball back and forth with his father in that park across the road. He plays for England now, in Gareth Southgate’s Euros squad. Alongside him are Kobbie Mainoo and Phil Foden, two young footballers raised just a few miles further east, in Cheadle Hulme and Edgeley respectively. For Foden, the equivalent origin story is told in the shadow of Stockport County’s Edgeley Park, where he would kick his football again and again against the brick wall of a car park until the day grew dark. Mainoo, by contrast, harks back to the wide, open greenery of Cheadle and Gatley FC. 

Should all three be selected to start this afternoon’s Quarter Final vs. Switzerland, then 27% of England’s players will have grown up within just 0.017% of the country’s total area, born less than half a decade apart. Is that sheer coincidence, or is Stockport a football talent factory by design?

Phil Brennan wears his glasses thick and his goatee wispy, wielding his contacts book generously, as though it belonged in the public domain. “In the very early 2000s, when the season was done, that would be it for the rest of the summer,” says Brennan, who was crowned as the FA’s North-West Youth Coach of the Year in 2006. “By around 2004, however, there seemed to be a real explosion of Junior Football tournaments all summer long. And Foden’s club, Reddish Vulcans, were the focal point of all of that. Theirs was the one you really wanted to play in and the one you really wanted to win.”

Traditionally, each grassroots club in the area would host their own local tournaments to celebrate the end of the season, but Joe Makin — Chair of Reddish Vulcans FC, Manchester City’s Academy Recruitment Coordinator, and one of Phil Foden's earliest coaches — felt they could do better if they used a centralised, neutral venue for each league. This would allow dozens of junior teams to play at a single ground over the course of just a few hours, replacing the pre-existing model of each side being allocated as ‘home’ or away’. The Armitage Centre in Fallowfield was chosen to host the tournaments on its high-quality playing surface, and referees with full FA accreditation were brought in to replace the local volunteers. “Within about two or three seasons, the number rose from 50 clubs entering to 150 clubs,” says Makin. 

Almost overnight, clubs as far wide as Liverpool or Stoke were able to scout hundreds of young players in a single visit to Greater Manchester. Competition for signatures grew fierce. A small army of retired PE teachers and hobbyists were recruited as part-time talent spotters on behalf of both City and United. Brennan recalls seeing “old blokes in long coats, asking ‘who's that short lad’, ‘who’s that quick lad there’. It started to happen every week.” By the time a young Foden surfaced at the end of the decade, both clubs’ scouting networks were established to a point of extreme sophistication. “Put it this way,” says Makin, “you can’t afford for any stone to be left unturned, because the next little boy might be worth £100m.” And so two years after Foden came Palmer, and two years after Palmer came Mainoo. 

Foden, Palmer and Mainoo did not come from serious poverty, but they weren’t especially wealthy either. Mainoo’s upbringing in Cheadle Hulme was perhaps the most affluent of the three boys, though Foden and Palmer went on to be schooled at the prestigious St. Bede’s College — with the £10,000 per year fees paid entirely by Manchester City.

All three households are said to have been stable and well-rounded environments. And all three boys were born into footballing families: Mainoo’s older brother was a promising young player in his own right, Palmer’s father a regular player in the local Sunday League and (though they may do well to downplay it now) Foden’s father was a staunch supporter of Manchester United.

Wythenshawe-born Michael Raynes graduated from Stockport County’s youth system in the early 2000s before going on to enjoy a 15-year career in professional football. Since retirement, he has returned to County as the club’s Head of Football Education. At 6’4” and with a slightly twisted nose, there is little doubt that he once made a ferocious centre-half.

“I think I can speak for the majority when I say that Stockport and Wythenshawe are not particularly well-off areas,” Raynes says. “But as a parent myself, I love that my kids can still go out and play. There’s that element of knowing that if they’re playing football then they’re not doing anything else in the streets, if that makes sense? They’re not messing about, they’re not sitting in parks. I think that’s a huge part of why some kids who don’t have that platform can end up finding themselves in trouble.” 

It’s an idea that Brennan can empathise with, as he recalls first delving into youth coaching to keep his son and his friends away from any potential trouble where they grew up around the streets of Drolysden. While none of his players have gone on to the heights of Foden and co, Brennan is content knowing that he’s played some part in their development as people, proudly noting that the majority of his team still stay in touch with one another, with many of them enjoying good jobs and young families, and some still playing at various levels of football. (He would also like me to point out that the team went unbeaten in both league and cup during his final season as a coach.)

Over the past decade, much has been made of the impact of London’s inner-city football ‘cages’  — narrow, bouncy asphalt pitches with tall metal bars around the perimeter — on a generation of players including Jadon Sancho, Wilfried Zaha and Eberechi Eze. This, perhaps, is why South London’s talent is defined by its skillset: working in tight spaces and pulling off audacious tricks. In Stockport and Wythenshawe, however, the footballing infrastructure is designed without such deliberate coherence: this current crop of players are united chiefly by their fearlessness, their willing desire to take hold of the ball. For a community so reliant on informal infrastructure, there is a certain streak of stubbornness required just to get a game on in the first place.

“I look at the park that’s up near me,” says Raynes. “There’s two football teams having a kickabout, probably under-10’s. There’s a guy called Darren who comes and cuts it every Friday evening so the younger ones can use them on Saturday, and then the pub team can use it on Sunday, and I’m looking at it right now [on Monday] and there’s a girls under-10’s team playing on it. Darren doesn’t get paid for that. He just does it because he wants to give a little bit back.” 

The lawn mower itself was purchased by a group of the pub team’s players after they grew tired of being let down by the local council. The team belongs to The Black Boy, a local pub on the Wythenshawe estate for whom Cole Palmer’s father Jermaine is a stalwart. Paying a visit to ‘Blackie” for England’s Round of 16 game against Slovakia, I found little noteworthy to speak of beyond the neatly designed beer mats and a cruelly overweight slug-dog let loose across the interior floor. 

But then, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? What else is this story about if not plucking the extraordinary from the ordinary? Without something as simple as a well-maintained football pitch, there is no little boy who idolises his father’s football skills, no soft introduction into the culture and repartee of men’s football, and perhaps no Cole Palmer that you or I have ever heard of at all.

Likewise at Cheadle and Gatley FC, where I watched the second half of the Slovakia match in a clubhouse recently restored by a parent of one of the club’s junior team. It was packed to the rafters that afternoon, and I could think of nowhere better to have witnessed Jude Bellingham’s acrobatic equaliser — and all of this in a building that was condemned for demolition just five years prior. 

It is this entrepreneurial stubbornness that provides a foundation for the next generation of the country’s superstars. Not just for Kobbie Mainoo but also for Holly Deering, his one-time teammate at Cheadle and Gatley who made her Manchester United debut just months after Mainoo made his. 

Are there any future England players here tonight, I wonder, watching on from beneath a dreary sky as the restless youth buzz back and forth across the AstroTurf at a session of Joe Makin’s Soccer School. They are a generation of Alfie’s and Cody’s and Kai’s, wearing oversized shirts and brightly coloured football boots, so blissfully unaware of just how lucky they are to be here.

I stand on the sidelines, the rain spitting down upon our gathered mass of parents, grandparents and unlucky older siblings, dragged along for the ride. Beside me, a woman in a headscarf shares a packet of Quavers with a newborn; beside her, a man in an Adidas tracksuit holds a plastic pint of Guinness in one hand and a tiny sleeping child in the next. There are four different coaches of three different ethnicities, the youngest separated from the eldest by an absolute minimum of 50 years. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It must take an entire town to raise a footballer.