Clockwise from top left: Austin, Evie, Zora, Justin, Libby.

With pupils at his former primary school, Button Lane. And that, of course, is not the half of it. Since making his debut with the club in 2016, he has played more than 260 games for them, 40 games for England and has scored 99 goals in the process. Even Manchester United fans might disagree with the ranking, but not with the sense that he is on a relentless upward trajectory. In January, Rashford was named the most valuable footballer in Europe (and effectively the world) with a transfer value of £150m, according to the research group CIES Football Observatory. Just keeping that consistency and that stability.” It’s not the fact that he has read this book, but the way he has that tells you something about Rashford about his ambition, his dedication, and his relentless pursuit of the possible. Never getting too high, so that the low feels even lower. Grover has helped him deal with what he calls the “hero one week, zero the next” nature of his job: “Balancing my mood and emotion. Then the next time I read it, I’ll highlight things in a different colour, and I’ll compare what I learned that time with the previous time,” he says. “Every time I read it, I analyse it and highlight things in a certain colour. Rashford has not read Relentless once or twice, but again and again. And unstoppable is what Rashford aims to be – not just in football, but in all walks of life. Its subtitle is From Good To Great To Unstoppable. Relentless is a self-help book about how to maximise your potential. He mentions his favourite book, Relentless by Tim Grover, the personal trainer who took some of the world’s greatest athletes, including Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, and made them even better. He tells me he didn’t start reading properly till he was 17 (which, let’s remember, is only six years ago). And yet today we’re meeting to talk about child literacy, Rashford’s latest passion. Ordinarily, after all, footballers are interviewed about football. Just imagine being Marcus Rashford, a supremely successful footballer, a shy young man who has never really shared an opinion publicly before, and you’re now dictating government policy. And suddenly you’re no longer just a footballing hero, you’re a leader, a sage, Mahatma Rashford, Marcus Mandela, a footballing messiah.

Then you put out a Twitter thread suggesting that the country’s poorest children need to be supported better in the pandemic, and it’s the government’s responsibility to help them. You’re just going about your business, playing football for Manchester United and England, being an everyday sporting superstar.

You are a champion marcus rashford