The Rashford paradox: rich man, poor boy, team-player, activist – and a reluctant hero
Ahead of tomorrow’s crunch match, Harry de Quetteville unpicks the many sides to the England striker
Transformations, as the footballer Marcus Rashford knows all too well, are football’s particular magic. The villain of last week’s game is the hero of this week’s. There is no alchemy like it. Abused last summer for his failure to convert a penalty kick and help England win their first international tournament since 1966, Rashford is now feted for his brilliance in ensuring the team qualify for the last 16 of the World Cup. Yet even in a sport so defined by its fickleness, and even at a moment of such paroxysmal fervour, as England venture into the knock-out stages, no one embodies the mercurial nature of talent, influence, politics and stardom – and our contemporary obsession with it – more fully than Rashford.
Perhaps it is because of the way he plays, his lithe frame capable of acceleration to make even a seasoned fan gasp; pace which prompts comparisons with that other springheeled wunderkind, France’s Kylian Mbappé. But for all the hype, those same fans – England or Rashford’s club Manchester United – have often been left frustrated by mistimed finishes or poor decisions. Rashford can be brilliant and abject by turns – not just from week to week, but in the same match, from move to move. Sometimes his game appears to fall apart altogether – as in the last 18 months, before the arrival of Erik ten Hag as United’s manager and the easing of a shoulder injury helped him resurface.
“His loss of form went far beyond just being not great,” says one longtime observer. “He was awful, really awful for quite a long period.” Rejuvenated in recent months, there was still no guarantee he would make the World Cup squad. Yet here he is, confidence back, making the game look almost unfairly easy, putting Iranian and Welsh defenders on their backsides, teasing opponents with poise, pace, balance and quick feet, just as he did as a six-year-old.
It is this fallibility, these flaws in his otherworldly talent that makes him the subject, perhaps, of such public fascination, as if every so often Michelangelo painted the odd stinker. Rashford has angel wings tattooed over his shoulders yet makes no secret of the fact that, like the rest of us, he is all too human. Star striker Harry Kane, fusing the looks, straightforward charm and single-minded lethality of the Brylcreemed Spitfire pilot, is a far less complicated figure. Midfielder Bukayo Saka, with his glorious on-pitch technique and straight-a academic record, has braved racist abuse to find himself saluted by all – even fans of his club’s sworn rivals, Tottenham Hotspur.
But Rashford, through the astonishing highs and lows of his football, is engaged in an altogether more uncertain relationship with supporters on the terraces. And because, despite such uncertainty, this self-declared “shy kid”, who grew up on the poverty line in Manchester, has used the alchemy of football to transform himself not into a plastic celebrity but into Marcus Rashford MBE – government humiliator, charity enabler and feeder of the poor – he is today also engaged in a more profound relationship than any of his team mates with the nation beyond the touchline.
It is, by almost any measure, a startling achievement. As Rashford himself once put it: “I didn’t have much when I was growing up, so I had no idea my life could ever end up like this.” An understatement. As a boy in Wythenshawe, in a vast social housing project at the south of Greater Manchester, he was brought up by a single mother he still venerates, Melanie Maynard, with help from his older siblings – Dwaine, Dane, Chantelle and Claire – and his grandmother, Nanna Cillian. Money was very tight despite Melanie working several jobs, and Marcus often went to bed hungry. Even at Christmas, “Mum used to queue around the block outside the food bank for a Christmas dinner.” Only through his school breakfast club, where he feasted on the cereals he still loves – “Weetabix, cornflakes, Coco Pops” – could he count on a square meal to set him up for the day. It was a sated appetite that sowed the seeds of his later activism.
At Button Lane Primary School he was, by his own description, wellbehaved but “a proper back-seat boy in class”, who would far rather be out at local Hollyhedge Park playing football with Dane, five years his senior, and the other big boys. When he was allowed to go, Dane parked him on the touchline. Too small. So little Marcus practised on his own, relentlessly perfecting his keepy-ups until he could navigate the semi-circular pavement in front of the bedroom he shared with Dane, keeping the ball constantly in the air. Later, at United’s academy, his Andy Murray-like dedication to making the most of his talent, training to take the ball and move away from defenders in one motion – “on the half-turn” in the lingo – would mark him out again.
Soon he was dazzling with his local side, Fletcher Moss Rangers, where coaches like Mark Gaynord were well used to scouts from top sides dropping in on under-7 games. Rashford’s speed and relentless scoring – he put 12 past the keeper in one junior match – attracted talent-spotters from across the North West. But, as a Manchester United fan, he had only one destination in mind. He signed for the club aged nine. Two years later, he had left home, scooped up by the club’s scholars scheme to live in digs and concentrate on his football. The same year, Nanna Cillian, solace and provider of his favourite corn porridge, died. Rashford was uprooted and grieving. “It was,” he says today, “a terrible time in my life.”
Even on the pitch, where progress seemed assured by his astonishing speed, so prized in the modern game, he hit problems. In adolescence, his body grew so fast that he suffered from pains in his joints and only slowly did he recoup his ability to burn past defenders. His knees still ached at 17, but by then he was on the fringes of the first team.
When he did make his debut, in February 2016, in a European game, aged just 18, he scored twice. Starting in the Premier League for the first time, against Arsenal a few days later, he again scored twice. The hype machine cranked into gear. That first season he won the FA Cup with United, and was then included in the England squad for the 2016 Euros. Almost inevitably, he scored on his first international start too. Dream debuts, rags to riches – commentators inevitably talked of “fairy-tale stuff ”.
It would be wrong to say that, catapulted out of poverty by the riches of modern football (he earns a reported £200,000 a week) Rashford today leads a monastic life of self-denial. The Instagram feed of his school days sweetheart-turned-fiancée, Lucia Loi, is no stranger to the usual snaps of sports cars, jet skis and exotic holidays. But Rashford remains rooted. “The most important thing that happened when I started playing for United,” he wrote in his motivational memoir for children, You Are A Champion, “was when I came home and said to my family, ‘The person that you’ve seen and known before the game today is going to be the same person for the rest of my career.’”
And to be fair, it does seem more than just the usual branding banter. “I still wear pretty much the same clothes now as I did when I was a teenager,” he says. Though he is the face of the new Levi’s campaign and evidently enjoys being styled for a photoshoot, his tastes are a revealing mixture of down-to-earth and designer. Most comfortable in a T-shirt, he nonetheless knows the power of image and understands the “ridiculous reach” of social media. “I like it,” says the man with 6 million Twitter followers. “If you can spread positive messages through social media channels then do that.”
“He’s a very authentic character, albeit one with a very sophisticated social media team,” says one United observer. “So there has been a curation of his image, even as his affection and gratitude towards his mother, for example, is real and affecting.”
His best boyhood mates – Jamie Hendley (whom he met at breakfast club), Ashley Leather (“a really good footballer”) and fellow pro Ro-shaun Williams – remain so today. “Basically my other family,” Rashford says. They also helped keep him on the straight and narrow in those teenage days when the first flush of success and cash can wreck a youthful career.
Lucia Loi has certainly played a role in that too. United fans in part attributed the player’s recent slump in form to the couple splitting – as many did – during the sudden confinement of lockdown. Reunited, they got engaged in May.
In a young life already packed with twists and turns, that month was a major turning point for Rashford. It was then that Erik ten Hag arrived at United – after the disastrous reign of Ralf Rangnick had seen United implode against rivals Manchester City and Liverpool – and Cristiano Ronaldo enthroned, brilliant yet increasingly immobile, a solipsistic Alpha whose presence seemed to crush, not embolden, less bullish team mates – notably Rashford and fellow striker Anthony Martial. Close observers of United say it is no surprise that ten Hag’s insistence on fast-paced pressing and Ronaldo’s subsequent fall from grace have coincided with Rashford’s revival. ten Hag’s faith in Rashford proved restorative too; and it has been echoed at England by Gareth Southgate. We can all see the results.
Was the campaigning – that pandemic-era flowering of personal anguish about free school meals being cancelled with school itself – a distraction? A cause of his slump in form? It, and his political influence, blossomed so fast that even a man who had based his entire career on speed was surprised. When the Government relented only to announce those meals would not continue into the summer holidays of 2020, Rashford and the charity, Fareshare, with which he had teamed up, forced a policy reverse literally overnight.
Some bridled at his activism. “A lot of people told me that I should ‘stick to sports’,” he noted then, guardedly. This week, he was more explicit. “People don’t like to see a young black man being successful.” Or having a voice and using it. The man who still feels most at home where he grew up, beside the friends and family he grew up with, will not satisfy his critics by staying in his place.
That is the Rashford paradox – one of many for this footballer capable of touches both deft and gauche, this shy man who has found a huge voice, who can entrance and frustrate, and who as a result is both more feted and more rubbished than any other England player. Every member of the squad knows the pendulum of the public mood can swing between adoration and execration, but for Rashford, his on-field game and off-field activism propel its arc wider, make its consequences harsher.
He seems determined not to be deterred. He never was. “There’s a lot of my mum in me – and I don’t just mean we look alike!” he notes. “She has passed on so many traits that are really important to the way I live my life. She doesn’t care too much what people say about her, and I’m the same. And she never gives up, so neither will I.”
‘My mum doesn’t care too much what people say about her, and I’m the same’