Meet the Weekend League Squad Featuring Nearly Two Thousand Top-Flight Matches
How can you enhance a excellent veteran team who have won consecutive championships, featuring a double triumph boasting thirty victories from thirty-two matches?
Sign a raft of former pro players that have competed at the top level of club football and international football as you target additional trophies.
One Manchester side has an amateur veterans squad with 9 ex- Premier League footballers in their present roster.
Two Hundred Twenty-Two Top Division Scores, 325 Global Caps
The team Veterans Over 35s are located in southern Manchester and compete in the Cheshire Vets Division Premier Division.
The squad list this campaign boasts 9 ex- top-flight footballers, with a combined over 1,800 Premier League games.
This high-profile team also contains 222 top division scores and 325 international appearances.
The squad feature one forward, who notched thirty-seven goals in 117 games for his former club after joining them for £9m from Bundesliga club SC Freiburg in 2012.
Cisse had his first appearance for Wythenshawe in their last home match versus reigning title holders Collegiate Old Boys and netted every one of the six goals in a 6-2 victory - including a 32-minute first-half hat-trick.
The team for this season also includes ex- professionals such as England and Anfield forward Emile Heskey, Hull and Burnley FC winger George Boyd, Toffees forward Oumar Niasse, Wigan Athletic defender Maynor Figueroa, City pair Stephen Ireland and Nedum Onuoha and Premier League title victors Joleon Lescott and Danny Drinkwater.
Together, the former top-flight players have won fifteen major honors and moved for combined transfer sums of around £123 million.
Well-Known Names and Global Players
Stephen Ireland began turning out for the team in pre-season this season through close mate and present Wythenshawe player Blake Norton, and the ex- Republic of Ireland midfielder then asked additional former professionals, who all compete in a midweek small-sided game, to participate.
Ex- Senegalese forward Niasse, who scored 12 goals in sixty-five top-flight matches for the Toffees and still goes to their matches at Goodison Park, also made his first appearance against the opposition - who are located in the city and use an Everton warm-up gear as their uniform.
"My friend Stephen said 'join and play, it's good fun'," commented Niasse.
"After that he told me we were playing a side from Liverpool and the surprise I had when I noticed them wearing Everton kits - I say this is wrong for me!
"If you still love football and you feel you can still do it, wherever you can play, what are you going to do?
"Those spectators who come and see are happy and to make someone's moment if they see us competing there and to ask us questions - it's really about the pleasure of us having a place we can play, with structure of course."
Such is the strength in depth at Wythenshawe, he made his first game at full-back.
"It's a little different but then, I enjoy sprinting and just go forward - I'm not staying back that much," he added.
"I warn my centre-back 'I'm not hanging back' and that I'm just going to keep running.
"The movement is what I'm looking for. It's good fun."
Dreamlike' Scenario
Along with the forward's six scores on his first game, Ireland has scored eight in 3 games for Wythenshawe, while Boyd scored 5 on his first appearance and Joleon Lescott, a centre-half by position, scored a triple in one game as a striker.
Wythenshawe are top of the Premier Division with 3 wins from 3 and a goal difference of +19.
Paul Barrow, thirty-eight, who features on the flank for Collegiate OB, faced ex- Wigan defender Figueroa on the weekend - and had to tell his nine-year-old boy who Heskey was.
He has played at two global tournaments for Honduras, in addition to featuring in over two hundred Premier League matches.
"The news was spreading like a rumor they had these ex-Premier League stars," said Barrow.
"I felt I was a bit awestruck facing Figueroa to be honest.
"Even Heskey came on and he's got over 60 English caps.
"We held our own for a solid twenty mins but then we had a man sent off and it was hard.
"We literally haven't stopped talking about it - I was phoning my mum and sibling on the way home.
"They were all dead sound, shaking our hands after the game - it was like facing a group of regular fellas.
"Now we can't wait for the second fixture."
'We'll Still Win the Title'
Andy Kirby coaches the Collegiate veterans side, who won the Top Division title the previous campaign, together with his co-manager.
"Our team went 1-0 up and had a