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It’s not been given the Netflix or Disney treatment yet, but for authenticity and football royalty, a new series of short films called This is Salford takes some beating.
The star and central character is Sir David Beckham, who, with Gary Neville, we see on an emotional return to the old Manchester United Littleton Road training ground for the first time since he left the club and hear him affectionately describing some of the more unknown aspects of his marital life. His wife’s exasperation, for example, with him constantly having football on TV without even watching it. ‘Victoria hates it!’
And her questionable taste in birthday presents for him. ‘I’ll go and buy my wife a handbag and I know she’s going to like it, whatever I spend on it,’ he says. ‘But for my 50th birthday, I had to say, “Don’t buy me something s**t!”’
When the ‘Class of ‘92’ bought Salford City in 2014, backed financially by Singapore billionaire Peter Lim, Beckham was very much a silent partner, with little of the visibility of Gary and Phil Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt.
But with Lim having withdrawn his backing last year, and the former United players struggling to keep the club going, ‘Brand Beckham’, with Gary Neville, are at the core of an overhaul which has brought in a new group of 22 wealthy US, Indian and British investors – known as the ‘members’ – as co-owners.
The re-introduction of the club’s old orange strip from next season, replacing the red which the Old Trafford alumni brought in, provides another clue to the impact of Beckham, the ultimate brand influencer, whose DRJB Holdings business recorded a £34.2million annual profit last year.
Beckham recalled how, as a young United player, he had watched Salford City’s Dave Gardner play in orange at the club’s old Moor Lane ground. His own Inter Miami have demonstrated the commercial value of playing in an unconventional colour. For Miami pink, read Salford orange.
The change – approved after Neville put it to a meeting of season-ticket holders – represents as much of a move away from the Manchester United brand as Salford City’s Companies House listing, which details the ‘termination of appointment’ as directors of all the Class of ’92 members bar Neville.
Though Scholes remains director of the club’s four-man recruitment team, all of the originals felt that it was time to hand over the baton.
Giggs, who stepped down as director of football in September, is the one whose presence is most noticeably reduced, for reasons which remain ambiguous. Daily Mail Sport understands a section of female Salford City fans felt uncomfortable about his involvement and profile, after the domestic abuse charges laid against him which a jury failed to agree on in 2022. There is no evidence that this lies behind his absence.
The EFL’s rigorous examination of the club’s proposed new co-owners – to ensure they complied with their owners’ and directors’ test – took until the brink of this season to complete. But with that process concluded, it meant the signing, in August, of Michael Rose from Stoke City, Brandon Cooper from Leyton Orient and, perhaps most critically, Dan Udoh from Wycombe Wanderers, who has delivered five goals and four assists so far this season. Italian ex-Liverpool striker Fabio Borini arrived on a one-year deal.
It has enabled manager Karl Robinson to take the club into what is shaping up as a promotion campaign, with a critical match at his old club MK Dons on Saturday. Salford are fourth, three points behind leaders Walsall, and the Dons fifth, a point behind them.
Robinson tells Daily Mail Sport how, in the uncertain period before the new ownership structure was in place, there was no money for a pre-season tour, let alone new players.
‘It went from six to seven to eight (investors), to “now David’s in” to “Gary’s back in” to “Ryan might step aside”. Paul then wanted to come back more into it. If I needed things before that time, Paul and Ryan would just put their hand in their pockets and get it for me. And then things started to fall into place.’
The unusual financial model – with ‘members’ recruited from Beckham and Neville’s own networks and committing for five years – offers greater security than the Class of ’92’s annual trips to Singapore to ask Lim to maintain the funding.
The challenge, as always with Salford, is how to grow a club which does not have a huge fanbase. The average attendances of 3,300 this season are League Two’s 18th best. This is a club who only 10 years ago were playing in the Northern Premier League. The Class of 92 took them up four tiers to League Two, where their climb has been halted.
For matchday revenue, they are way behind MK Dons (average attendance this season: 7,400) and Swindon Town (8,000), whom they beat 3-2 at home on a wet Saturday which, with Beckham in attendance, produced the best This is Salford episode yet.
But with Beckham and Neville as part of the sell, there is potential for the same international sponsorship which has fuelled Hollywood clubs Wrexham and Birmingham City.
Beckham and Neville will be in India this month, as part of the club’s expansion into the Asian market which has seen Mumbai-based DreamSetGo, a sports travel firm, become a commercial sponsor.
Beckham always did seem the one of the ’92 with the greatest draw. His 88.2million followers on Instagram even puts Ryan Reynolds’ 51million in the shade, which is probably why the film star wanted him in season one of his own Welcome to Wrexham docu-series.
Beckham has not yet been a prolific promoter of the club on Instagram. But the strength of his relationship with Neville, evident in the short films, has clearly made him committed to contributing substantially.
One of the films captures the two of them in a taxi driving around old Manchester haunts, with Beckham reminiscing about the Manchester United issue Honda Prelude he once drove and Neville observing that he swapped his for a more sensible Honda Accord ‘four-door saloon’ because he ‘couldn’t fit anyone in the back’.
Their memories of Littleton Road, now Salford City’s training ground, as teenage players – Beckham being carpeted by United coach Eric Harrison for hitting ‘Hollywood passes’ and the reverence they felt for Nobby Stiles, then still a coach – provide football gold surpassing any other celebrity owners.
The significance of Beckham as part of the appeal has become clear at meetings of the ‘members club’, where he has been voluble – articulating to investors the value of them spending to support the development in the Littleton Road ground, allowing the club to compete in the recruitment of young talent.
‘It’s about storytelling,’ Beckham relates at one meeting. ‘If we can get a story through, that gives us the opportunity to bring in kids to our academy and prove we are a great opportunity, we can succeed.’
The club’s new chief executive Gavin Fleig, recruited from Manchester City, has declared the building up of the academy and youth player sales to be a way of making the club ‘sustainable at the highest level we can in the EFL’. Which suggests that, in the medium term at least, the Championship is the goal.
Fleig has said he wants to apply City’s way of succeeding to Salford. His own move to British football’s fourth tier was sold to him by two of the investors who Neville pursued for their corporate knowledge as well as investment potential. The first is Declan Kelly, a long-time friend of his, whose New York-headquartered investment company Consello will be building out the club’s commercial operations in the UK. And the second is Lord Mervyn Davies, the former banker and Labour Government trade minister.
The switch to orange will see Salford City be positioned as a club in their own right, rather than a byproduct of one of United’s great football generations. Of the initial switch to red by the Class of ’92, Neville told supporters: ‘I did something quite selfish and that should not have really happened. It’s not sat well with me since.’
His humility and delivery were impressive and despite a few initial objections – several fans had red-shirted tattoos – the vote for the shift was comfortably carried.
‘We respected the way he approached fans,’ Danny Shepherd, host of the Salford City podcast, One Up Front, tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘If we voted against, he would have stuck to the old colours. The sense of momentum had been lost but it feels like it’s back again.’
Robinson attributes his rediscovered love of the game at Salford, nearly a year after his dismissal by Oxford United, to the Class of ‘92 players. ‘Without them, I don’t know where my head would be.’ He feels something significant beginning to build. ‘It’s like a pan starting to simmer. Not making too much noise. We’re just starting to simmer before what I think will be a fascinating “fasten your seatbelts” five years for the club.’
Beckham’s star power provides the greatest potential to grow the audience, with the club’s YouTube audience numbers flying since the start of the short film series, produced in-house, which had always been an ambition of Neville’s. His revelations also include the fact that he once used to keep new football boots on in bed to wear them in. ‘I still do that every now again for Victoria!’ he jokes, taking viewers to the kind of place that other football documentaries can’t reach.
