Marcus Rashford (b. 1997)
Filed under the name Marcus · June 2, 2026
Marcus Rashford is a genuinely excellent footballer for Manchester United and England, but the thing that actually made me tear up reading about him — postpartum hormones or not, I'll own it — was the campaign he ran to get free school meals extended for disadvantaged kids in the UK, and won. He used the exact kind of platform athletes usually spend on sneaker deals to instead make sure kids who weren't his own didn't go hungry over a school break, and the government actually reversed course because of the pressure he built. I've got a seven-month-old who eats better than most of the world's children by pure accident of geography, and it's hard not to think about that when I read a story like his. It would have been so easy for him to just play the sport and let someone else worry about policy. He didn't. That's not a small thing, using fame like that instead of just banking it.