It’s now official.. the Joe Mcaree Junior Stadium is a facility that the kids can warm to

standing on the back of my neck. I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing, should I take this on?’

“But I went ahead with it and we got a £46k grant to put down a new grass pitch, then we got the wooden, Portakabin changing rooms up, and it went really, really well, it was very successful.

“It has left us that we’ve been able to attract good players, we are a match for anyone.

“I’m not saying we are the best but we are definitely an equal for anyone in the country with regards to playing football with most of our age groups at National League level which is the highest standard you can play in kids’ football in this country.

“And what a job the National League and the NIBFA have done, led by Mr Gerry Mckee, an absolutely fantastic job. We go across to tournaments as we do, we go across to Spain, down south, we go to the Supercupni, we go to the Scotland Cup, tournaments all around, we’ve been to Canada three times, in America, and we’ve always been more than capable of holding our own.

“And don’t tell me that children’s football is not about winning. If the child doesn’t want to win at 12 years of age, I don’t think it’s a good sign.”

Facilities are vital to the success of a club, of course, but its real beating heart, its lifeblood and soul, is the people themselves, and Mcaree says he has been blessed to come across some of the best.

“The voluntary workers deserve an awful lot of credit,” he said.

“People and parents of young footballers don’t realise how difficult it is to keep a team together, to train twice a week, to look after the children, give them a decent session of training, take them to Derry maybe at 8am on a Saturday morning, knowing you won’t be back to at least 2.30pm… these people are invaluable, they are worth their weight in gold, and I have some of the best about. Every club needs people like that, but to get the right people is very difficult but we’ve been lucky and I’m very proud to have achieved this next phase in our development and we now, in my opinion, have the best junior football set-up in maybe Ireland and England.

“I’m talking about junior clubs, we are based on our own, we run our own club, we pay our own bills… I can’t think of one, and we had one of the top men over from Fulham Football Club, I’m not going to name him, and we only had the wooden Portakabin at the time.

“He took a look around and he said to me, ‘Joe, I would have to say that what you have here, there’s no junior club in England would have this.’

“So if he comes back over now, he’d get his eyes opened.”

For people like Mcaree and his wife Carol, the club treasurer, Dungannon United Youth is all-consuming.

Officially, his shift starts at four in the afternoon, but up to that point he admits he’s already spent most of the day preoccupied with other chores and concerns – sending emails, completing paperwork, chasing debt and “thinking about what has to be done next”.

When Match On Tuesday caught up with him last week, he had nipped home for a quick coffee.

It was getting late on Friday evening but his work was still far from done as he headed back to the stadium to mop up and lock up after the 16s game against Cliftonville.

On a typical day, it’s close to 11pm before he finishes, seven days a week, but he wouldn’t have it any other way, even if the progress of his beloved club has come at a small cost.

“In a way, it’s sad for me that when I had three or four teams, I knew every player, I knew every manager