He was one of Alex Ferguson’s bright young stars at Manchester United who transformed English football. ⚽ Now Gary Neville (@GNev2) wants to revolutionise education.
“We are famous for being the Class of ’92, young players coming through,” he says. “We were given an opportunity.” It was never only about the game.
Neville still remembers the power of the dressing room pep talks and the camaraderie of a team determined to triumph against the odds.
The traditionalists were dismissive of these inexperienced rising stars – “You can’t win anything with kids,” Alan Hansen commented on Match of the Day – but they were soon running rings around the older players.
Neville’s latest venture is setting out to help disadvantaged young people in Manchester get a better education, with a new university that explicitly draws on the strategies and mindset of elite sport.
It's called UA92, a deliberate reference to the Class of 92, and several of his former team-mates – Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Phil Neville and Paul Scholes – are also involved, although David Beckham is not.
“When we finished playing football, we recognised that there are a lot of young people in Greater Manchester who are from our backgrounds who don’t have the same opportunity, who don’t have the same pathways, who don’t make it into football or sport,” Neville says.
“And they struggle to get out. They struggle to really have that aspiration and to have that belief. We talk about social mobility, we talk about giving people an opportunity, but what’s in place for young people to actually do that?”
“I didn’t go to university. The Class of ’92 would never go to university. [We thought] ‘University is for posh people. University is for people who are really intelligent.’ So people don’t have the belief that university is theirs. It’s something you can’t achieve.”
Neville sees UA92 as a “disrupter” in an ivory tower world that seems increasingly arcane and out of touch. “We rip down the walls of snobbery here,” he says.
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