Manchester United club legend Paul Scholes is now the caretaker manager at Salford City F.C., a League Two side that plays in the four tier of the English football system. The club, founded in 1940 and owned by Project 92 Limited, is not your everyday group of minnows.
Owned by a consortium led by some of the biggest names in United history, the side won promotion from the National League in 2018-19. Due to their prodigious financial backing and ambitious leadership, they have been rising, but hit an obstacle under previous manager Graham Alexander. With Alexander sacked, Scholes now takes over on an interim basis.
“The Class of 92 venture, including David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Nicky Butt, and Phil Neville, even saw the ex-England star take caretaker charge of a game in 2015. Their funding quickly elevated City to League Two, where they sit fifth in the table.”
The five superstars purchased half the shares of Salford City in 2014. According to the Mail, Scholes wasn’t enthusiastic at first about taking over in the dugut, and the club’s development manager Warren Joyce is expected to help once he has cleared and completed a period of self imposed isolation due to coronavirus exposure concerns.
The Ammies, as they are known, play their home games in the Peninsula Stadium, a venue with capacity just north of 5,000. Scholes, known to be quite critical of football managers in his punditry work, provided a sense of schadenfreude last season for those he’s hit out at publicly.
This came when he got his first serious taste of managing, at Oldham Athletic AFC, another fourth tier side, where he lasted just seven games and won only once. It all proved to be much harder than he thought, given what he’s said behind a microphone. Perhaps he’ll improve significantly this time around.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Tribune and SB Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.