Inside Salford City and how controversy-mired Ryan Giggs has become the most influential of Man United's Class of 92… but they're still losing £70k a week 10 years on

The messages etched on the corridor walls at Salford City’s modest little stadium convey the hope that old-fashioned values and sheer love of a place might bring football success.

‘Hard work, determination and never giving in. We learned our football principles in Salford,’ reads Gary Neville’s declaration. ‘Salford had the ingredients that made me a player,’ states that of Paul Scholes. Such was the ethos of the ‘Class of 92’ – a group of footballers whose collective name encapsulates the notion that an exceptional, young cohort can take on the world, if they’re ambitious enough.

An image of that group, standing on the grassy mound from which they would watch Salford play sides like Prescot Cables, Farsley Celtic and Grantham Town after buying the club ten years ago, reflects the uncomplicated joy they have all discovered here. Scholes says he finds watching football in this place more fulfilling than the Premier League. That mound, removed amid the stadium’s redevelopment into the modern Peninsula Stadium, was ‘where I feel happiest and most complete,’ Neville said in the early days.

And now, the FA Cup Third Round, with its beautiful capacity for storylines transcending the blood and thunder of the week-to week, takes the club, built on the principles of a glorious Manchester United era, to Manchester City. It is the greatest competitive challenge that Gary and Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Nicky Butt have known since becoming football club owners.

The tie oozes the idiosyncrasies of Third Round weekend. Salford captain and centre half Curtis Tilt, who 12 years ago was a JCB digger driver, shifting sand around a quarry, has bought 105 tickets for family and friends. Karl Robinson, the club’s excellent manager, took training on an indoor pitch a fraction of the size of City’s playing surface, on Thursday, because every available grass surface was frozen.

But coping with the Premier League champions is a modest prospect, compared with the broader challenge facing Salford’s owners. The match comes five months after Peter Lim, the Singaporean billionaire, friend of Neville and principal Salford City investor, announced that this is the last season he will fund a club currently running losses of £70,000 a week and £4million per year. It was a blow to a club who flew through the non-leagues, winning four promotions in five years, but, despite Scholes once voicing Premier League aspirations, they have been lodged in League Two for the six years since.

The League Two side are known for being owned by the Class of 92 (pictured together in 2016)

But the club face a huge challenge in the coming months with Peter Lim (right), the billionaire, friend of Neville and principal Salford City investor, set to stop providing his funding to the club

Despite a run of eight wins and clean sheets in nine under Robinson, which puts the club third in that division, the league’s third lowest average home attendances (2,800) allied to one of its top ten wage bills lends an obvious urgency to the search for new financial backers. TV money and a 50 per cent share from sale of tickets sales this weekend will earn the club around £1million. That will fund the club’s operating costs for just a few weeks.

It’s the moment in the spotlight – the owners’ first chance to bask in a big Cup narrative – which seems to be the most valuable commodity on Saturday, as they seek investors from the UK or abroad who might be attracted to partnering with such football royalty.

Had Giggs’ life beyond football not been shrouded in controversy – with a jury unable to decide whether he was guilty of assault and coercive behaviour towards an ex-girlfriend before a retrial was dropped – then he would be a huge asset to the club, during its moment in the sun.

Giggs is, after all, the most Salfordian of any of the group. The one who would play kickaround games on fields called Rabbit Hills, near the old Agecroft Colliery, half a mile from the ground ball. Who played football for Salford Boys under-11s and watched his brother, Rhodri, play for and manage Salford City. It was he who made the exploratory phone call, when it came to the first approach about buying the club in 2014.

Out of the public spotlight for more than four years since criminal proceedings forced him to resign the Wales manager’s job, Giggs is now more involved in Salford City than any of the owners. He is the club’s director of football, an active contributor to training, and has remained a fixture on the bench since he deputised there for Robinson’s assistant Alex Bruce, in October. It seems likely that he will be on the bench at the Etihad.

Thursday this week began for Giggs with a recruitment meeting at the stadium with interim chief executive Jonathan Jackson, Robinson, Scholes and Ross Duncan, who leads the club’s player acquisition operation. All of them poring over the player data analysis to which the co-owners will sometimes bring intuitive assessment. It continued with him joining training, as he generally does.

It’s often after Robinson has wrapped up the main training session that Giggs will wander over to the wingers and help them aspects of their game. ‘If the lads are doing a little bit of extras, he’ll will go over to them and put his little input in,’ Tilt, the captain relates. ‘Developing their crossing or movement patterns in the wide areas.’ By general consensus, Kelly N’Mai, the club’s 20-year-old Dutch winger, who had trials with United and City, has benefitted.

This all sounds rather intimidating for Robinson, though he says it’s not. ‘I think I’d be a little bit stupid if I didn’t say, “oh yeah, please stay,” he says. ‘He might say something, or Alex Bruce might say something, and then I’ll have an opinion, and we’ll come to a conclusion together.’

Salford’s interim CEO Jonathan Jackson opened up on the need be financially sustainable 

Ryan Giggs is heavily involved at Salford, with the United legend the club’s Director of Football

Giggs (fourth left) has been a regular presence on the bench and is a key figure in training

At a recent fans’ forum meeting, Giggs described touring the major player agencies for two days with Robinson at the end of last season, working contacts and urging them to help send promising young players Salford’s way on loan. He’d also been the one who secured a training ground for the club at United’s Littleton Road facility, a mile from the stadium, he revealed. ‘I worked hard with United and eventually we got there,’ Giggs said. ‘The training ground we had before meant the players had excuses. That was something I was determined to change.’ This club seems like Giggs’ life, now.

The Class of ’92 certainly don’t seem to want their images plastered around the place. A modest picture of them, on a timeline of the club’s meteoric rise through the non-leagues in the players’ tunnel, is as much as you’ll find. But Robinson describes being so taken by the conversation with them when they approached him about the job, on New Year’s Day last year, that he and his wife made an unscheduled overnight stay in Manchester, so he could speak to them again the following day. ‘We arranged to meet the next day and agreed I would take the job,’ he says. ‘I didn’t sign a contract for the first seven games.’

Without such owners, the pursuit of new investors would be ‘a different proposition,’ Jackson says. ‘Their kind of profile does attract investors from overseas, as well as well as this country.’

The story Salford have to sell – because that’s what new investors are so often looking for these days – might also provide appeal, because the club has travelled from nowhere in lightning time, having been averaging less than a 200 average gate, 11 years ago.

One of the first games Scholes and Butt saw as owners was a 6-0 defeat on a ‘cow-field of a pitch’ at Kendal, in Cumbria. But pictures of Salford’s ground in the 1980s, soon after they’d moved in there, reveal something similar, with a rickety wooden stand and bumpy pitch. The club didn’t enter the FA Cup until 1990 because they lacked the necessary floodlights.

Supporter Dave Farrar has been watching them since the 1960s when they were playing on a park pitch off Salford Crescent, with a 2-1 win over Radcliffe Borough a monumental occasion. There is no hankering back to those days, he says, even though the club is a more commercialised place these days. ‘The old committee people are still involved,’ Farrar relates. ‘There’s still Babs doing the away end food and still Frank, our club historian writing for the club fanzine. The owners have been careful about things like that. People occasionally reminisce about watching from the old mound, but people only really moan when we’re not playing well.’

The one major change the Class of ’92 brought in was changing the home strip from tangerine to red. ‘Away fans can use that as a stick to beat us with, but we only played in tangerine for a decade. Red’s always been the Salford colour,’ insists Farrar.

‘I do wonder if promotion this season is a good thing for a team with such a small fan base as ours and currently little chance to expand,’ says Danny Shepherd, host of the Salford City podcast, One Up Front, and editor of excellent Salford FC fanzine ‘The Old Dead Tree’, launched after the club stopped publishing their club match programme this season. ‘Can we really afford the increase in wages? But we are pinching ourselves that all this has happened. Our appreciation of the owners is a heartfelt thing.’

Under Robinson, Salford have won eight in nine, putting them third in League Two right now

Salford captain and centre back Curtis Tilt (No 16) gave Mail Sport an insight into life at Salford

The Class of 92 have been praised for respecting the club’s history during their tenure

The loss of that match programme, which became commercially unviable, was a minor tragedy, given the exceptional, iconic covers, capturing the spirit of Salford, designed by Andrew Gordon, the club’s creative and engagement manager. A montage of the covers, inspired by Salford band New Order, The Smiths Granada Studios, LS Lowry and Salfordian playwright Shelagh Delaney is displayed at the stadium entrance. They really warrant an exhibition at the Lowry Centre, the £100million Millennium Commission venue around which Salford Quays redevelopment has been built.

The programmes capture the raw, working-class identity of Salford, a place which has had its struggles, and which does not welcome being confused with, or associated with, wealthier Manchester. Though there is no local expectation of progressing at the Etihad, there is intense local motivation for wanting to punch City on the nose. A number of Salford’s players are United fans.

Few football people have better experience of beating City in the Cup than Jackson, whose ten years as chief executive of Wigan Athletic, before joining Salford, initially in a finance role, included the 2013 FA Cup final win over the club, two days before relegation from the Premier League, and the elimination of City at the quarter final stage the following season.

Jackson sees similarities between Salford and Wigan – clubs lacking long football histories trying to make progress. ‘Wigan did progress all the way to the top,’ he says. ‘Of course it can be done.’

He worked to make Wigan financially sustainable, earning immense respect within the game in the process, only to face the ownership chaos which saw the club plunge into receivership. ‘Sustainability’ has been the byword he has brought to Salford.

Jackson says that Lim’s departure does create a need to reach financial sustainability quicker. ‘But with the ownership that we have and the growth of the club and the current success that we’re having on the pitch, we’ve had no shortage of investment interest. We’re fortunate that the owners are able to fund the football club – so it’s not as though it’s a cliff edge.’

Old United connections are helping in myriad ways. Salford have stumbled upon a market of Manchester United ‘weekenders’ – overseas visitors who, if the Old Trafford match is on Sunday, will take Salford’s game on a Saturday. ‘That’s something that we’re looking to tap into. To attract more of them,’ Jackson says.

For once, Neville, Scholes, Giggs and Co find themselves onlookers in a collision with City this weekend – watching, waiting and hoping that the motivational messages they’ve placed on their club’s stadium walls like will strike a chord. ‘Integrity and Industry’ declares one of the more prominent.

Scholes put in an unexpected appearance at training on Thursday, perhaps hoping that he could bring something, and it reminded Salford’s players of one of the first time they’d come up against him in that environment. ‘It was a possession game and some of the lads was firing it into him, trying to make him to make a mistake,’ relates Tilt. ‘But he just didn’t. That’s just crazy, after years of not playing professionally. We’re just taking whatever we can from that.’