Blue stumps, bright orange windballs zipping about. Kwik Cricket sets, a piece of nostalgia for any Noughties child. The knockabout tournaments for school, the small boundaries at a club down the road.
Salesbury Primary, in a village just north of Blackburn, are competing in one of those and between games, a mum – Helen, a PE teacher, a local tennis champion – takes her youngest child onto the outfield. She chucks underarms at her toddler to keep him entertained.
‘He had this little bat and was just lobbing balls right off the square over to the boundary,’ says Stephen Bird, a teacher watching over while coaching Salesbury. ‘He was two! He’s whacking this ball. He’s timing it really well… good cricketers often make good footballers, don’t they?’
Everything comes easy to a lucky few and here waddled a two-year-old Adam Wharton. The youngster wriggling out of his buggy over the street at football club Wilpshire Wanderers while his brothers Scott and Simon play. The youngster whose somersaults on the family trampoline in the back garden were ‘like you’d see in the Olympics’.
While that might be something of an overstatement, his gymnastic prowess was such that they crept into celebrations, coaches attempting to curb the flamboyance as he struggled with knee and back problems while growing. Wharton’s first senior goal for Blackburn Rovers, against Birmingham City in October 2022, came complete with a backflip.
Maybe there will be one on Saturday, at Wembley, when Crystal Palace face Manchester City – a powerhouse who tried so hard to land a teenage Wharton but were rebuffed – in the FA Cup final. Whether he recovers from an ankle niggle has been the most stressful element of Palace’s build-up.
Crystal Palace’s Adam Wharton is struggling with an ankle problem ahead of the FA Cup final
Wharton made a £22million move from Blackburn to Palace in the January window last season
Wharton has shone at Palace and is one of the world’s most in-demand central midfielders
Steve Frost, president of Wilpshire Wanderers, is looking out over the great Lancastrian vista from his study at home. He says he can see Wharton’s primary school, the cricket club and Wilpshire’s playing fields from this vantage point in the Ribble Valley. It paints a picture of a sleepy community and Frost fondly recounts how kids go straight from football kits to cricket whites over the street.
‘I remember his granddad coming over, when Adam was really young,’ Frost says. ‘He goes, “If you think Scott’s good, wait for this lad to come through”. I’ll never forget him saying that. Adam came to hand out medals for us two years ago. Everyone’s having selfies with him, we’re walking and he says to me, “you’re digging up and reseeding the pitch? I remember you kept kicking me off when it was being redone”.’
Scott, a centre half, is on Blackburn’s books and the middle brother, Simon, was handy himself and still plays locally. Adam, though, had this brain. The sort of brain that led educators at the private Moorland School, with whom Blackburn had a link for their brightest academy talents, to claim he could have turned to rocket science had it not worked out at Rovers.
It’s a little sickening to hear about Wharton, truth be told. Fine central midfielder, lovely left foot, someone who would have flourished as an all-rounder at Lancashire after featuring for their Under 10s. Laidback, likable. And a sharp mind. What’s your talent, Adam? Everything, I guess. He even had hotly contested chess matches with FA chief executive Mark Bullingham at last summer’s European Championship.
‘He could tell you what was happening in a game brilliantly,’ Darragh Tuffy, Wharton’s coach from Under 13s to Under 18s at Blackburn, says. ‘Better than a coach could. Even at half-time, he would come to you and tell you what was wrong.
‘We’d do video sessions where the lads would feed back to us what they’re seeing. I’ve got a clip on my laptop of him presenting to us. I’m calling him Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher – he was that good at it, able to go into such detail.’
Sadly, Tuffy politely declines to hand over that piece of gold before discussing Wharton’s penchant for respectfully challenging coaches. Like when it was suggested his pressing hadn’t been up to scratch in one academy match, at which point Wharton calmly explained his version of events.
‘This happened multiple times and I walk away thinking he was right,’ Tuffy says. ‘He didn’t know how good he was. A dream as a coach. There was no arrogance. I’d say to him, “do you realise how good you are?” and he’d shrug.’
Wharton playing for local club Wilpshire Wanderers, where his talents first became apparent
At Blackburn (in the dark blue away shirt, third from right), who he joined in 2010 aged six
Wharton’s former teachers have claimed he had the intelligence to become a rocket scientist
He won his first England cap last summer, against Bosnia and Herzegovina at St James’ Park
Blasé and languid are descriptions of a teenage Wharton, for whom Rovers needed to constantly create challenges. End-of-season meetings and handovers to new coaches at different age groups would focus on making sure the enjoyment of the game wasn’t lost rather than any specific development points.
Rovers were aware someone special was coming through their ranks, despite Wharton being the smallest and them having concerns over his physicality. They started playing him out of position to test his ‘psychological robustness’ and also made life frustratingly difficult in training. He barely flinched.
‘People used to criticise him for not running enough or say he wasn’t combative enough,’ Tuffy adds. ‘He’d be running less than others but probably having more effect. He just knew where to be. The Cup semi-final is a good example where he nicks it off (Youri) Tielemans for the goal.’
Wharton had played solely as an attacking midfielder in the academy so was shunted out to the left wing and, to give him more problems to solve, pushed back to No 6. He solved them so well his performances in a deeper role led to a £22million transfer to Palace after fewer than 50 Championship games, and an England senior debut last summer. That smooth style, running driven from the hips – blamed for persistent groin problems that eventually required an operation this season.
Former Palace sporting director Dougie Freedman knew of Wharton even before his first-team debut, giving the Eagles an edge. David Moyes wanted him at West Ham and thought the club should have been more aggressive. Everton looked. Dan Ashworth regularly attended Ewood Park for Newcastle.
Not many fancied stretching close to Blackburn’s £25m asking price. Now, it is thought Wharton could fetch around £60m and Real Madrid scouts have recently been making checks. Liverpool are monitoring the situation.
A late developer, Wharton. He was held back in Blackburn’s Under 18s but once he was in the Under 21s, he flew. Tony Mowbray and his assistant Mark Venus asked him to train with the first team as a second-year scholar, while making sure not to overload somebody who hadn’t finished growing physically. Mowbray fed back to the academy, saying: ‘I don’t say this very often but that kid is outstanding.’
Once Jon Dahl Tomasson took over, Wharton took off. ‘Oh my God, who is this kid?’ Tomasson asked after the first time watching him.
Wharton’s ability left coaches astounded and open-mouthed throughout his time at Blackburn
Former Rovers bosses Tony Mowbray and Jon Dahl Tomasson could barely believe their eyes
Wharton has come into form for Palace in the second half of this season after injury struggles
By the time the Dane took charge Wharton was described as a ‘different animal’, and a man-of-the-match display at Blackpool, on his full debut, in August 2022 changed everything for the boyhood Rovers fan. A boyhood fan who strode out as a mascot in 2008 before a game against Chelsea, a boyhood fan whose YouTube channel with friend Kristi Montgomery (who made his Rovers debut last month) – which showed them on the driveway perfecting skills far in advance of their tender age – led to an invite to do the same on the Ewood pitch.
Daniel Stubberfield had intermittently been Wharton’s coach from the age of nine through to 14 and was at Bloomfield Road for that first professional start, five seats along from Helen and father John – a French polisher and mean spin bowler in his day.
‘I was able to give Adam a cuddle at the end,’ Stubberfield says. He and Tuffy joined Rovers on the same day 17 years ago and listening to both of them is to hear pride. Both plead not to overblow their contributions. Both insist any coach could bring through an Adam Wharton.
‘I saw a kid in the youth team who had a lot of ambition and dreams,’ Tomasson says. ‘Adam wasn’t the finished article. I went to talk with him and his parents at their family home, about how he could develop into a senior player, to become a Premier League player and to play for England. It gives me a lot of joy to be able to help someone like that.’
That family home – or more specifically, the kitchen – was the scene of a conversation that ultimately shaped Wharton’s career at 16. What was to happen now? Stay at Blackburn or go? Wharton wasn’t the lad doing backflips on the trampoline anymore; this was serious. He decided to stay at Rovers, and there has to be something in the loyalty going both ways there.
Blackburn’s tests of his maturity, and the size of brother Scott, made it clear Wharton would eventually catch up to his peers in build. But it was some wait. ‘You’d never believe how small he was,’ Stubberfield says. There is a picture from an Under 14s Iber Cup final in Portugal, which Rovers won, where Wharton’s contemporaries tower over him. Tuffy mentions club concerns about his out-of-possession work owing to a lack of physicality.
Regardless, Wharton shone at every age. His hybrid agreement with Moorland – effectively that he trained more than other kids – and alternating between age groups on a daily basis, helped create the rounded player we see now.
‘There was a trip to Holland where he was player of the tournament at Oldenzaal,’ Stubberfield says. ‘He scored a half-volley in a seven-v-seven game but it felt like it was a long way out, arrowed as an adult would hit it, rocketed straight in.
Wharton has been known to give advice to his coaches on how they should set up and beat teams – will he give Palace boss Oliver Glasner the same help before Saturday’s FA Cup final?
Wharton poses with his family at Euro 2024 – older brother Scott is still on Blackburn’s books
Wharton is admired by the likes of Manchester City, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Barcelona
‘He was outstanding against Barcelona when he was eight, to the point where the Barca coaches actually said to his parents: “Look, if you ever come to Spain, call us, we’d love him”.’
Wharton had a bit of La Masia about him and Mail Sport columnist Graeme Souness says he possesses a ‘head that is constantly scanning’. Small, technically gifted, football-intelligent.
It’s evident in footage of his first appearance at Wembley, a decade ago now, in a Kids Cup final – for Salesbury Primary, representing Blackburn, against Bournemouth. They won on penalties – Wharton scored his – but some of the stuff he did, in a match an hour before that year’s Championship play-off final, is exactly what you would expect now, not of a 10-year-old.
There is one passage of play in which he nicks possession and cleverly buys a foul in his own third, before bouncing up to clip a free-kick forward. All while gliding. ‘He also did a little Maradona twirl in the final,’ says Bird, his Year 6 teacher and coach. ‘There’s around 10,000 people in the ground at that stage. The crowd just gasped. They purred a bit when the replay came on the big screens.
‘At the north of England final stage we had this free-kick against Wigan just past the halfway line. He zipped it, a daisy-cutter, all the way into the area. He’d seen our forward move and he’s just strolled onto it and put it in. I just remember thinking I’d never really seen a lad his age do that.’
The twirl in the final came complete with a right-footed cross for a team-mate, who volleyed wide, on a stage previously graced by Jamal Musiala. In a nice bit of symmetry, Salesbury are back at Wembley a week on Saturday. Bird still coaches them.
Wharton might have missed that big day out in 2015 but was insistent he wouldn’t let the school down.
‘He’d already committed to coming to a tournament in Holland,’ Stubberfield says. ‘What we agreed was that the team would fly back to Manchester with the other staff but me and Adam would fly to London. His mum would meet us at the airport and take him to Wembley.
Wharton receives his Euro 2024 legacy shirt from Prince William before flying out to Germany
Wharton has come a long way since emerging as an astonishing young talent at Wilpshire
Wharton rose through the England ranks and is now ready to be a fixture in the senior squad
‘Adam was naturally very quiet. That flight is the most I ever felt he opened up to me. The secret with him was to talk about anything in the world apart from his position or development. Just chat to him. It was five or six hours and he never stopped talking. About Rovers, video games, school. It was strange really. I had almost felt like I didn’t know what his voice sounded like! It maybe strengthened our relationship. It was a warm moment.’
Wharton goes back to the academy now to say hello. Stubberfield has teased him about changing his old black Audi – ‘modest for a footballer’ – and noticed that at Rovers, amid the Louis Vuitton washbags, he was still using an old Umbro bag handed to players when they were 12.
This was when he had just broken through and coincided with a trip down to the capital with a mate. Although with a few quid available to him, Wharton became bored wandering around Soho and called agent James Featherstone to ask if tickets were available for City’s trip to Arsenal that night.
They were and the next day, Wharton called Featherstone to say thanks. He ended up on the phone for an hour discussing Arsenal’s defensive set-up and how to counter it. Perhaps Oliver Glasner will receive similar before Palace’s game of a generation.
