Introduce this Sunday League Team With Nearly Two Thousand Top-Flight Matches
What can you enhance a stellar veteran team that have secured back-to-back championships, including a double triumph with 30 wins from 32 games?
Sign a group of former professionals who have performed at the highest level of club football and international soccer as you aim for more honors.
One Greater Manchester side fields an amateur veterans team with 9 former Premier League players in their current squad.
Two Hundred Twenty-Two Top Division Goals, 325 International Appearances
Wythenshawe Veterans Over 35s are located in southern the city and compete in the Cheshire-based Vets League Top Division.
The lineup this season features nine former Premier League footballers, with a combined 1,801 Premier League appearances.
This elite squad also boasts over 220 top division goals and 325 international appearances.
The squad feature one forward, who netted 37 goals in over 100 games for his former club after moving to them for nine million pounds from German league club SC Freiburg in 2012.
Cisse made his first appearance for Wythenshawe in their most recent home match against reigning champions their rivals and scored all six scores in a 6-2 victory - including a 32-minute first-half triple.
The squad for this campaign also includes former pros such as English and Liverpool forward Emile Heskey, Hull City and Burnley midfielder George Boyd, Toffees forward Oumar Niasse, Wigan full-back Maynor Figueroa, Manchester City duo Stephen Ireland and Nedum Onuoha and top-flight title victors Joleon Lescott and Danny Drinkwater.
Together, the former Premier League footballers have won fifteen big honors and transferred for total transfer sums of around £123m.
Household Names and Global Stars
Stephen Ireland started playing for the team in pre-season this season through good mate and current Wythenshawe player Blake Norton, and the ex- Republic of Ireland midfielder then asked other former professionals, who all play in a weekly nine-a-side game, to participate.
Former Senegalese forward Oumar Niasse, who netted twelve scores in sixty-five top-flight games for the Toffees and still attends their matches at Goodison Park, also made his first appearance against Collegiate OB - who are located in Liverpool and wear an Everton training kit as their uniform.
"My mate Stephen Ireland told me 'join and have a game, it's good fun'," commented the striker.
"Then he told me we were playing a side from the city and the shock I had when I noticed them sporting Everton kits - I say this is strange for me!
"When you still enjoy football and you know you can still do it, wherever you can kick a ball, what are you going to do?
"The spectators who turn up and watch are pleased and to make a moment if they watch us competing there and to ask us questions - it's really about the pleasure of us having a place we can play, with organisation of course."
So great is the bench strength at the club, he had his first game at defender.
"That's a little unusual but then, I enjoy running and just move forward - I'm not staying back that much," he added.
"I tell my defender 'I'm not hanging back' and that I'm just going to continue running.
"The movement is what I'm seeking. It's enjoyable."
Unreal Feeling
In addition to the forward's six goals on his first game, Stephen Ireland has scored 8 in three appearances for Wythenshawe, while Boyd scored five on his debut appearance and Lescott, a defender by trade, notched a hat-trick in one match as a striker.
Wythenshawe are leading of the Top Tier with 3 wins from 3 and a GD of +19.
Paul Barrow, thirty-eight, who plays on the flank for Collegiate OB, came up against former Latics defender Figueroa on Sunday - and had to tell his nine-year-old boy who Emile Heskey was.
Figueroa has appeared at 2 World Cups for Honduras, in addition to featuring in more than two hundred top-flight matches.
"It was going round like a rumor they had all these former top-flight stars," said the player.
"I felt I was a bit awestruck playing against him to be honest.
"Also Heskey came on and he's got 60-odd England appearances.
"We held our own for a solid 20 mins but then we had a man sent off and it was tough.
"Our group really have not stopped talking about it - I was phoning my mum and sibling on the way home.
"The opponents were all really nice, shaking our hands after the game - it was like playing a group of normal guys.
"Now we are eager for the second match."
We Will Still Win the League'
Andy Kirby coaches the Collegiate veterans team, who won the Premier Tier championship last season, along with Paul Maguire.
"Our team scored 1-0 ahead and had a