As a kid, Callum Gribbin could see the floodlights of Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, every time he opened the curtains in his bedroom window.
Clarke Avenue, on the edge of Ordsall Park, was just across the Manchester Ship Canal from the stadium. On match days, the noise travelled across the water. Gribbin listened to the crowd’s roars and dreamed of pulling on the team’s colours.
By the age of five, he had been enrolled in United’s centre of excellence. Gribbin was so talented the coaches put him in with players two years older. Within 18 months, Nike had got in touch with his family, completely out of the blue, to introduce themselves and offer some freebies. Everyone knew the boy was special.
Gribbin knew it, too. One report hailed him as “the English Messi”. He never asked for that kind of hype but the football world is always on the lookout for the next Old Trafford wunderkind and Gribbin ticked the boxes: a superstar-in-the-making with magic in his boots and the world at his feet.
Everything seemed to have fallen into place when, from the age of 16, he was fast-tracked through the system to train with Wayne Rooney, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Angel Di Maria and Old Trafford’s other A-listers.
Gribbin, front row, second from left, was part of a Manchester United U19 team that played Wolfsburg in the UEFA Youth League in 2015. Team-mates included Marcus Rashford, back row, centre, and Axel Tuanzebe, front row, far right (Photo by John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
And then came the fall.
Gribbin’s 15 years at United came to an end in 2019, aged 20, when his contract expired and Nicky Butt, then United’s academy chief, broke the news there would not be another one. “Prove us wrong,” was the message from Butt. “You’ll either end up working at McDonald’s or we’ll buy you back for £100 million.”
As it has turned out, Gribbin has done neither. His story is more complex than that and a reminder, perhaps, about the often unseen challenges that can trip up even the most supremely talented footballers.
The man sitting here today – older, wiser, more reflective – is now with FC United of Manchester in the Northern Premier League, the seventh tier of English football.
This is the first time Gribbin has told the story and, by his own admission, it has been a heavy fall, including the ordeal last year of rupturing his knee ligaments: the injury every footballer fears the most.
Gribbin will look you straight in the eye and tell you, emphatically, that he backs himself to start climbing the leagues. But he knows it is a long way back and that there are a lot of people who “will look at me and where I’ve been and want to know, ‘What happened?’”
Some of his problems, he readily admits, have been self-inflicted from a time in his life when he was younger, more impulsive and a two-year period when, in his own words, he “abused” his own talent. At other times, he has been the victim of circumstance and some rotten luck.
Gribbin has done a lot of self-reflection, learned a lot about himself and the football industry as a whole.
“I definitely see football differently now,” he says. “As a kid, I just loved it. Then you get older and you realise it’s ruthless and not as you imagined when you were growing up.
“I can understand why so many people fall out of love with it. I’ve not gone through that myself – I don’t think I have ever fallen out of love with it. But you do have this distaste for it sometimes because there are parts of the game that are cruel.”
His knee was mangled in a game against Warrington Town in January 2023 by the kind of agricultural challenge – old-timers would call it “a reducer” – that tends to be more prevalent at that level than the highest rungs of the football ladder.
It took Gribbin 15 months of hard slog before making his comeback and in that time he encountered some harsh realities about life this far down the football pyramid.
“If you’re at a top club and you’ve done your knee, you’re looked after in-house,” he reflects. “The club will take care of everything and you don’t need to worry about anything other than getting fit again. When you’re at the bottom, though, it’s nothing like that.”
Gribbin had to apply for funding from the Professional Footballers’ Association to pay for career-saving surgery. It was a long, tortuous and stressful process, dealing with endless layers of paperwork and administration. The operation cost £7,500 and, in the end, the PFA agreed to stump up half. The rest came from FC United setting up an online fundraiser asking for donations and making it clear his entire career was at stake.
Gribbin finally had the operation two months after suffering the injury. “The whole thing turned into a bit of a nightmare,” he says. “It left a bad feeling that the PFA have got everything back to front. They will help out the top players with all sorts of things. But it’s when you’re at the bottom that you really need help.”
His time out has given him a chance to reflect on everything that happened at Old Trafford and get a better understanding, perhaps, about what went wrong.
“I have to take some responsibility and say, when I was younger, I didn’t handle myself in the best way. I let myself down massively at times.
“Towards the end of my time at United, I was difficult. I wasn’t getting a chance in the first team and I was unhappy about it. I went into self-destruct and started getting up to the wrong things away from football.
“I was immature and, because I was so talented, I think I relied on it. I abused it over the years. I relied on my talent getting me through all the time. So I do think I needed the lesson of getting released. I have grown up so much. Looking back, I see it completely different now from how I did at the time.”
He can talk so candidly because, now 25, he has come to realise he was “not old enough or mature enough” to handle some of the challenges that, ultimately, led to the separation. Time, he says, is a healer. And, though it ended badly, he has come to terms with the decision and understands there is nothing to be gained from feeling embittered.
“I was always ‘the talented kid’ but I’m not that kid any more,” he points out. “A lot of time has passed. My last two years at United were painful. Overall, though, my time with United was unbelievable. I worked with the best coaches and the best players and I could never say a bad word about the club.”
Gribbin grew up with Wayne Rooney as his favourite player and, like his hero, had an eye for the spectacular. He was a popular member of the dressing room: a dribbler, passer and dead-ball specialist all in one – described recently by Demetri Mitchell, another United academy graduate, as a mix of Mesut Ozil, Martin Odegaard and Cole Palmer.
Liverpool wanted to coax him away. Manchester City, too. Gribbin was named in The Guardian as one of 20 Premier League stars of the future. Kenny Swain, manager of England’s under-16s, talked about feeling “breathless” watching him play.
Gribbin was 17 when he agreed his first professional contract and, by that stage, Louis van Gaal had already invited him to join United’s first-team training.
“I didn’t feel out of place at all,” Gribbin recalls. “We (the academy) used to train on the next pitch to the first team. I used to love it when we’d finished training and I got to watch them for 10 minutes. I’d see them in the canteen having their dinner and I used to always think, ‘I want to get on their table’. So when I was moved up, I just went with it. My attitude was: ‘This is where I need to be.’”
— Callum Gribbin (@CallumGribbin99) May 14, 2018
The problems began later. Van Gaal was sacked after winning the 2016 FA Cup final and his replacement, Jose Mourinho, never seemed fully aligned with United’s traditions of promoting youth. Mourinho had a habit of referring to young players as “kid” and it left a poor impression on Gribbin, among others.
“I used to think, ‘He’s not arsed, is he? He doesn’t even care about getting to know my name’. I look back now and I know I shouldn’t have got pissed off about it. But at the time, it used to get to me that I’d go out for training and he wouldn’t even watch.
“He’d be speaking to his staff or on the phone and I used to think, ‘I’m here, I’m trying to get a chance and he’s not even interested’.
“If I did say something to anyone, he’d be looking at me like, ‘You can’t be having a go, you’re an 18-year-old training with the first team’. But in my head, I was thinking, ‘No, I want to get a chance here’. So there were a few issues with Mourinho and other staff. Little things, just building up.”
Maybe, on reflection, he was too impatient, too restless, when he would have better to keep his head down and wait for everything to fall in place. But that brings us back to the fact Gribbin was not your average footballer. He felt he had outgrown United’s under-23s. He wanted a slice of the real action and, denied what he wanted, that was when everything spiralled.
(John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
There was talk of him being loaned out for first-team experience but nothing ever came of it. That was another source of frustration and so was the time, in the summer of 2018, when Gribbin was widely expected to go on United’s pre-season tour.
“I was getting texts from the club about my passport details and I was thinking, ‘I’m going to get my chance here’. It was in the newspapers that I was going. But I wasn’t included and I didn’t react well. I made some bad mistakes. I fell out with a few people and, towards the end, I lost my head, really. I knew it (being released) was coming.
“It was still a shock and tough to take. I was gutted, absolutely devastated, but I honestly think I needed it to happen. I needed to learn the lessons that came from being released. I’d missed so much football in my last two years and I just wanted to get back playing again.”
Unless you have been in that position, it is difficult to understand the emotional impact on an up-and-coming footballer who has gone all the way through the academy system with one club and then, as a young adult, had it ripped away.
(John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Gribbin had spent three-quarters of his life in United’s system. Released, he went on trial at Brighton, then managed by Graham Potter, as well as Casa Pia in Portugal’s second division.
“I couldn’t get my head around it,” he says. “It was tough to take, going on trial and having to prove myself again when I’d been at a club like United for so long. It was a weird one, mentally, to get my head around. I found it hard and in that first year I don’t think I gave the best version of myself.”
He was still highly regarded enough for Sheffield United, in their first season of Premier League football under Chris Wilder, to sign him. But that, too, was a learning curve for a player who had become used to life inside the Old Trafford bubble.
The little things, sometimes. On one occasion, Gribbin took a bottle of water from the canteen of Sheffield United’s training ground without thinking he might need to ask. That might have been fine in Manchester, where the players were treated like royalty. In Sheffield, it got him a telling-off. Another lesson learnt.
“It took me a while to get going,” Gribbin says of his time at Bramall Lane. “Jack Lester was academy manager and Andy Hughes was in charge of the under-23s. I still speak to them now – really top guys. But they had to be so patient with me.
“Andy was getting me in at 7am to do sessions. It was tough. Honestly, Manchester United is a holiday compared to the training at Sheffield United. It was completely different: the running, the programmes. I’d never trained like that in my life – three sessions a day, every day.
“I remember telling Jack, ‘I didn’t really want to come in today’. And then, a few months later, I was properly enjoying it. I felt good. Jack said, ‘Do you remember what you told me a few months back?’”
On reflection, maybe he should have accepted the offer of a new deal in Sheffield at the end of his first year. Wilder wanted to keep him. By now, however, Gribbin was getting offers from elsewhere and, aged 21, impatient for a run of first-team action.
Barrow, newly promoted to the Football League, offered him exactly that. The manager, David Dunn, told Gribbin that if he was willing to drop down to League Two he would shape the team around him. It was a gamble and there were clubs in higher divisions who wanted him. But Gribbin was persuaded.
“It was my first proper experience in men’s football when I felt I had been lied to,” says Gribbin. “I got there and, on the first day, I knew straight away that it wasn’t going to happen.
“He didn’t have a great start (Barrow didn’t win any of Dunn’s first 11 games) and, now that I’m older, I can look back and understand why he went the way he did, using more experienced players. It was just difficult for me to go in every day knowing I was never going to play.”
And so, he ended up in the Northern Premier League, first with Radcliffe and then FC United, the club formed in 2005 by Manchester United supporters rebelling against the Glazer family’s takeover at Old Trafford.
FC United have been averaging crowds around 1,500 this season. The team are 19th in a league of 22 clubs and last month they moved out the manager, Neil Reynolds, who had signed Gribbin and led the ‘Collection for Callum’ fundraiser, describing him as a “beautiful person inside and out.”
It is not, in other words, the level of football that Gribbin necessarily saw for himself when he was being hailed as the best left-footer to come through United’s system since Ryan Giggs. But he is realistic about why he is here and appreciative of what they have given him.
“I’ve always had the mentality that I came here to play regularly as an opportunity, a platform (to go higher),” he says. “If I went with the attitude of, ‘I’ve been at Manchester United and now I’m down here,’ it’s a lose-lose. You get nothing out of thinking like that. I’ve seen it happen, though. I know players who have gone down to this level and it can mess with you.”
His family have told him his luck will change and that he should be proud of the mental strength he has shown during some challenging times. His father, Tony, is at every game and, as a former amateur boxer, understands better than most the psychology of sport. They refuse to be downbeat. Everyone wants to believe that, with the right manager and the right circumstances, there is time for this story to have a happy ending.
People stop Gribbin in the street to say the same. “You get the odd comment on Twitter,” he says. “But the people I meet are mostly positive. Some kid started talking to me the other day. I was like, ‘How do you even know who I am?’”
He and Jess, his long-time girlfriend, have a two-year-old daughter, Esme, and a six-month-old son, Ruben. Fatherhood has helped to shape his new sense of maturity.
As for United, there are still people at Old Trafford who consider him one of their own. Gribbin took part in an alumni training camp at United last November, arranged for the club’s former academy players. He enjoyed seeing so many old faces and was touched so many staff and coaches got in touch after hearing about his knee.
Recently, he has had to contend with a hamstring strain, but it is nothing serious. He should be back on the pitch soon and, though it is essentially a part-time league, it says a lot about his attitude that he trains full-time, spending endless hours in the gym, as well as hiring one-on-one coaches, to go with FC United’s Tuesday and Thursday night training sessions.
A lot of players at this level take regular jobs and, in effect, give up on the idea of playing professionally. Gribbin, though, has different priorities. Mentally, he says, if he found work outside football “that would mean the end”. And the bottom line here is that this guy is not prepared to abandon his dreams.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have days when that has come into my head,” he says. “But I’ve always believed in my talent and that I’m too good to give it up.
“If I wasn’t as good as I was, even 10 per cent less, I would have given up. But I see the next 18 months as a massive opportunity to get back to where I need to be.
“Everyone has different career paths and I know for a fact that, if I’m fully fit and playing, people will come to watch. I still believe, honestly, I could make it back to the Premier League.
“So it’s all on me, really.”
(Photos: Getty Images/Callum Gribbin; Design: Meech Robinson)
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