A whole new game
IMAGINE BEING MARCUS RASHFORD. You’re just going about your business, playing football for Manchester United and England, being an everyday sporting superstar. Then you put out a Twitter thread suggesting that the country’s poorest children need to be supported better in the pandemic, and it’s the government’s responsibility to help them. And the tweets go viral. And the public agrees with you. And suddenly you’re no longer just a footballing hero, you’re a leader, a sage, Mahatma Rashford, Marcus Mandela, a footballing messiah. Just imagine being Marcus Rashford, a supremely successful footballer, a shy young man who has never really shared an opinion publicly before, and you’re now dictating government policy. How profoundly must it change you?
Ordinarily, after all, footballers are interviewed about football. And yet today we’re meeting to talk about child literacy, Rashford’s latest passion. He tells me he didn’t start reading properly till he was 17 (which, let’s remember, is only six years ago). Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He mentions his favourite book, Relentless by Tim Grover, the personal trainer who took some of the world’s greatest athletes, including Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, and made them even better. Relentless is a self-help book about how to maximise your potential. Its subtitle is From Good to Great to Unstoppable. And unstoppable is what Rashford aims to be – not just in football, but in all walks of life.
Rashford has not read Relentless once or twice, but again and again. “Every time I read it, I analyse it and highlight things in a certain colour. Then the next time I read it, I’ll highlight things in a different colour, and I’ll compare what I learn ed that time with the previous time,” he says. Grover has helped him deal with what he calls the “hero one week, zero the next” nature of his job: “Balancing my mood and emotion. Never getting too high, so that the low feels even lower. Just keeping that consistency and that stability.” It’s not the fact that he has read this book, but the way he has that tells you something about Rashford; about his ambition, dedication and relentless pursuit of the possible.
In January, Rashford was named the most valuable footballer in Europe (and effectively the world) with a transfer value of £150m ($210m), according to the research group CIES Football Observatory. Even Manchester United fans might disagree with
