I’d never noticed this stuff but it’s his trade, and he learned it from a textbook, did it endlessly and watched the best footballers do it to learn from them. Marcus Rashford doesn’t set out to be the Samuel Smiles of our era, but he points out that it was practice, practice, practice that helped him nail the really difficult trick of turning into a ball as it approaches. This is a pep talk applicable to just anyone.īut besides the message that everyone is special, which is undeniably true, there’s a useful moral here, which is that the harder you practice, the better you get. Or to put it another way – this emphasised with lightning flashes – You Are At your Most Powerful when You are Being You. So, to all the shy and awkward children out there, the message is a benign one: You are a Complete One-Off, so stop comparing yourself with other people. Look at your hands… no one else has those fingerprints. What it amounts to is an enormous morale booster.

The book is written with the help of journalist Carl Anka and a performance psychologist, Katie Warriner. Even the most reluctant reader gets the message. And for younger readers it’s not set out in boring old type: it’s laid out to catch the eye, with bold type, big type, type circled repeatedly, text interspersed with bouncy footballs, all a bit like the kind of inspirational card you get at Paperchase. This is a message we get in various forms throughout.

The essential formula is: “I want you to be you, and I want you to be the best version of you that you can be”. You Are a Champion is the title, and indeed the gist. It’s the book he wishes he had had as a teenager, he says, though it’s hard to think how his meteoric rise could have been any steeper. He’s written a children’s book, except this takes the form of a self-help book. What will this prodigy do next? Well, what he has done is the obvious next step for a celebrity. He’s been Sports Personality of the Year and on Time Magazine’s 100 Next List. He’s set up a children’s book club to promote reading. He has established a Child Food Poverty Taskforce and a programme to educate the nation’s children about food and cooking. S there no limit to Marcus Rashford’s reach? Apart from being a striker for Manchester United and the England team, he pretty well dictates government policy on the provision of school meals during the holidays. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

You Are a Champion by Marcus Rashford