Last year the football star twice fought Boris Johnson on food poverty – and won 2-0. Now he has a new goal: helping the 383,000 British kids who have never owned a book
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.
