Discover the Sunday Division Team Featuring Over 1,800 Top-Flight Matches
How can you improve a excellent experienced side that have won consecutive titles, featuring a double triumph with 30 wins from 32 games?
Sign a raft of ex- professionals that have played at the elite level of club and global soccer as you target additional honors.
One Manchester club has an amateur veterans squad with 9 ex- top-flight players in their current roster.
Two Hundred Twenty-Two Top Division Scores, Three Hundred Twenty-Five Global Appearances
Wythenshawe Vets Over 35s are based in southern Manchester and play in the Cheshire Veterans Division Premier Division.
The roster this campaign includes 9 former top-flight footballers, with a total over 1,800 Premier League games.
This star-studded roster also boasts over 220 top division scores and over 320 global appearances.
The squad include Papiss Cisse, who netted 37 goals in over 100 appearances for his former club after moving to them for £9m from German league side SC Freiburg in January 2012.
He had his first appearance for the team in their most recent home-field match against defending champions their rivals and netted every one of the six scores in a six-two win - including a half-hour opening period triple.
The squad for this campaign also includes former professionals such as English and Liverpool forward Emile Heskey, Hull City and Burnley midfielder George Boyd, Everton forward Oumar Niasse, Wigan Athletic defender Maynor Figueroa, Manchester City duo Stephen Ireland and Nedum Onuoha and top-flight title victors Joleon Lescott and Danny Drinkwater.
Together, the ex- top-flight footballers have won 15 significant honors and transferred for total transfer sums of around £123 million.
Well-Known Names and Global Stars
Ireland started turning out for the team in pre-season this summer through good mate and current Wythenshawe teammate Blake Norton, and the ex- Republic of Ireland player then asked additional ex-pros, who all compete in a weekly small-sided match, to join in.
Former Senegalese forward Oumar Niasse, who netted twelve goals in 65 top-flight games for the Toffees and still goes to their matches at Goodison Park, also had his first appearance against Collegiate OB - who are based in Liverpool and wear an Everton warm-up gear as their strip.
"A friend Stephen said 'come and play, it's enjoyable'," said the striker.
"Then 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 strange for me!
"When you still enjoy football and you know you can still do it, anywhere you can play, what are you going to choose?
"Those people who turn up and watch are happy and to make someone's moment if they see us playing there and to pose us questions - it's more like the pleasure of us getting a place we can enjoy football, with structure of course."
Such is the strength in depth at the club, he made his first game at defender.
"That's a bit unusual but then, I enjoy running and just move inside - I'm not staying back that much," he said.
"I tell my defender 'I'm not staying' and that I'm just going to keep attacking.
"That running is what I'm after. It's good fun."
Dreamlike' Feeling
Along with the forward's 6 goals on his first game, Stephen Ireland has scored eight in 3 appearances for Wythenshawe, while George Boyd scored five on his debut appearance and Joleon Lescott, a centre-half by position, scored a hat-trick in one match as a striker.
The team are top of the Premier Tier with three wins from 3 and a goal difference of plus nineteen.
Paul Barrow, thirty-eight, who features on the wing for the opposition, faced ex- Wigan full-back Figueroa on Sunday - and had to tell his nine-year-old boy who Emile Heskey was.
Figueroa has played at two World Cups for Honduras, in addition to featuring in more than two hundred Premier League games.
"It was spreading like a rumor they had these ex-Premier League players," said Barrow.
"I felt I was a little awestruck playing against Figueroa to be honest.
"Even Emile [Heskey] got on and he's got 60-odd English appearances.
"Our side held our own for a good 20 mins but then we had a player sent off and it was tough.
"We literally haven't stopped talking about it - I was phoning my mum and brother on the journey home.
"They were all friendly, shaking our hands after the match - it was like facing a group of normal fellas.
"Now we can't wait for the second match."
'We'll Still Win the League'
Andy Kirby manages the Collegiate vets side, who won the Premier Tier title last season, together with his co-manager.
"We scored 1-0 up and had a