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How do you improve a excellent experienced team who have won consecutive championships, featuring a league-cup double with 30 wins from 32 matches?

Bring in a raft of ex- professionals that have competed at the top tier of club and international soccer as you pursue additional honors.

A Greater Manchester side boasts an amateur veterans team with nine former top-flight players in their current squad.

Two Hundred Twenty-Two Top Division Goals, 325 International Appearances

Wythenshawe Veterans Over 35s are based in southern Manchester and compete in the Cheshire-based Veterans Division Top Tier.

Their lineup this campaign features nine former top-flight players, with a total 1,801 top-flight matches.

This star-studded roster also includes 222 top division goals and over 320 international caps.

The squad include Papiss Cisse, who notched 37 scores in 117 appearances for his former club after moving to them for £9m from German league side Freiburg in January 2012.

Cisse made his first appearance for Wythenshawe in their most recent home-field match versus defending title holders Collegiate Old Boys and scored every one of the six goals in a 6-2 victory - featuring a 32-minute first-half hat-trick.

The roster for this season also features former professionals such as English and Liverpool striker Emile Heskey, Hull City and Burnley FC winger George Boyd, Toffees striker Oumar Niasse, Wigan full-back Maynor Figueroa, Manchester City pair Stephen Ireland and Nedum Onuoha and Premier League championship winners Joleon Lescott and Danny Drinkwater.

Together, the former Premier League footballers have secured fifteen major trophies and transferred for combined transfer fees of about £123 million.

Well-Known Figures and Global Stars

Ireland started turning out for the team in preseason this season through good mate and present Wythenshawe player Blake Norton, and the ex- Republic of Ireland player then invited other ex-pros, who all play in a midweek nine-a-side match, to join in.

Former Senegalese forward Oumar Niasse, who netted twelve goals in sixty-five Premier League matches for Everton and still goes to their matches at Goodison Park, also had his first appearance against Collegiate OB - who are located in Liverpool and wear an Blue training kit as their uniform.

"A friend Stephen told me 'join and have a game, it's a laugh'," said Niasse.

"After that he told me we were playing a side from the city and the surprise I had when I saw them wearing Everton shirts - I say this is wrong for me!

"When you still love the game and you feel you can still play, wherever you can play, what are you going to choose?

"Those spectators who come and watch are happy and to make a day if they watch us competing there and to ask us queries - it's really about the joy of us having somewhere we can play, with structure of course."

So great is the bench strength at the club, Niasse had his debut at full-back.

"It's a bit unusual but then, I love sprinting and just go forward - I'm not staying back that much," he said.

"I tell my centre-back 'I'm not staying' and that I'm just going to keep attacking.

"The movement is what I'm after. It's good fun."

'Surreal Feeling

Along with the forward's six goals on debut, Stephen Ireland has netted eight in 3 appearances for the side, while George Boyd hit five on his debut appearance and Joleon Lescott, a centre-half by trade, scored a hat-trick in one game up front.

Wythenshawe are top of the Premier Division with 3 victories from 3 and a goal difference of +19.

One opponent, thirty-eight, who features on the wing for the opposition, faced former Wigan full-back Maynor Figueroa on the weekend - and had to explain his young boy who Heskey was.

He has appeared at two World Cups for Honduras, in as well as playing in over two hundred top-flight games.

"The news was spreading like a rumor they had all these former top-flight stars," said Barrow.

"I think I was a little awestruck facing Figueroa to be honest.

"Also Heskey got on and he's got 60-odd England caps.

"We competed well for a good 20 mins but then we had a man dismissed and it was hard.

"Our group really have not ceased chatting about it - I was calling my mother and brother on the journey home.

"They were all dead sound, shaking our hands after the game - it was like facing a group of normal fellas.

"Now we are eager for the second match."

We Will Still Take the Title'

Andy Kirby manages the opposition vets team, who secured the Top Tier title last season, together with Paul Maguire.

"We scored 1-0 up and had a