The story
Three acts, told straight.
Act one
The academy
Signed as a teenager by Blackburn Rovers in their Premier League years, then Bolton Wanderers. England at youth level, on the Wembley pitch he had once watched from the stands on a ticket his teacher paid for.
Act two
The end
He never made the first team. In his own words: I went from playing with some of the greatest players in the country to laying bricks on a building site, back at my mum’s place, in my old bedroom. It was over just as it got started, and this is where his life really began.
Act three
What came after
On the building site he kept thinking about an orphanage he had visited on a Blackburn Rovers trip to Eastern Europe. Children with nothing, who were happy. Twenty years rebuilding followed: a book, a TEDx stage, a schools programme that has run for a decade, and a body of work about how a person does exactly that.
