Morgan Gibbs-White – the mischievous schoolboy who became a 'special' footballer

In a cardboard box, among the piles of clothes and everything else at the bottom of Brian Punter’s wardrobe, there is a piece of paper that counts among his more prized possessions.

It is dated September 28, 2008, and it is the scouting report from the Mid-Staffs Junior League tournament when Punter, then a talent-spotter for Wolverhampton Wanderers, saw an eight-year-old Morgan Gibbs-White for the first time.

“I can still remember it,” Punter tells The Athletic, and suddenly he is out of his armchair to re-enact the moment, shaping up for a header in the manner of an old-fashioned centre-forward.

“It was the way he headed the ball that really stood out. He wasn’t big. Most of the other lads were two years older than him. But when the ball came up to him, he set himself for the header and I thought, ‘Christ, he heads the ball like a professional’. He was running the game, making the difficult things look easy.”

Punter played for Wolves in the 1953 FA Youth Cup final against Manchester United, won three England caps at youth level and went on to have five years as a semi-professional with Lincoln City in the lower divisions.

He is 89 now, living in a retirement home in Wheaton Aston, 12 miles north of Wolverhampton. He quit scouting in 2009 after his wife, Barbara, developed Alzheimer’s and has never sought publicity for being the scout who discovered Gibbs-White.

If anything, he sounds surprised that word has got out. “You always hope to find a player who goes all the way,” he says in his Black Country accent. “Morgan is mine. But until now, I’ve never had any recognition for it. How did you find me?”

With great difficulty, is the answer. Nobody at Wolves had a contact number or address. Punter, now widowed, has not been involved in football for 15 years. It took three trips to Staffordshire to locate him.

But how could we tell the story of Gibbs-White without tracking down the scout who discovered him, all those years ago, playing for Stafford Juniors under-10s on a Sunday morning at the Monckton recreation centre in Penkridge?

“It wasn’t hard to see he had a lot of ability,” says Punter. “He had bags of confidence. So I took his details, filled out the trialist’s form — which I have kept all these years — and invited him to the Wolves academy. I went with him on his first night and he wasn’t out of his depth at all.”

How do you even begin to imagine the satisfaction to see that eight-year-old become an England international and, in terms of sheer profit, the most valuable player Wolves have ever produced?

Punter was born on Waterloo Road, barely a long throw-in from Molineux, Wolves’ stadium. He still has scrapbooks from his playing days and, though he never made it into the Wolves first team, he was a season-ticket holder for many years.

His son, Jonathan, is a devoted fan and a photo on the lounge wall shows one of Brian’s grandchildren in the famous gold shirt. But it can be bittersweet sometimes. Gibbs-White is now the wearer of Nottingham Forest’s No 10 shirt, driving the club in their unlikely push for Champions League qualification, and his relationship with Wolves, the club where he spent 14 years and who he faces on Monday, is best described as… well, complicated.

It is, Punter says, “bloody annoying” that the player in question has made himself, at 24, an England international and bona fide Premier League star in the colours of another team.

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If you are not familiar with Stafford, it is a fairly ordinary market town beside a stretch of the M6 motorway, pretty much slap bang in the middle of the country.

There is a castle, an annual Shakespeare festival, a boat club (barges, mainly, given that Staffordshire has more miles of canal than any other county in England) and two semi-professional football clubs. Chris Birchall, the former Trinidad and Tobago international and once a team-mate of David Beckham’s at LA Galaxy, comes from the town. Gibbs-White, though, is the first footballer from Stafford to win a full England cap and that is important to him, especially with his family still living locally.

His parents, Leanne Gibbs and Kirk White, were still teenagers when he arrived, as the first of four children, on January 27, 2000. It was a large, supportive family. Brian, Leanne’s father, shed tears of joy after his grandson’s first England call-up. Kirk was almost always on the touchline, shouting encouragement to his son in his younger years.

They lived in an end-of-terrace house, three doors down from the now-closed Antelope Inn, a classic Stafford pub with its own darts, dominoes and cribbage teams and a husband-and-wife duo, Bob and Dot, pulling pints behind the bar. Tillington Manor, Gibbs-White’s junior school, is just around the corner.

Kirk grew up in Stafford and spent seven years as a window cleaner before becoming the operations manager of Dubbz window cleaning service.

Once a prolific scorer in the Staffordshire amateur leagues, he understood the importance of hard work and made it clear to his son that talent alone was not enough. Kirk could see Morgan had magic in his feet and did not want it to go to waste.

The family ended up moving into a housing estate in Stafford’s North End, closer to the hum of the motorway, and that suited the young Gibbs-White given that it was just a short walk to the football pitches in Holmcroft Park.

It wasn’t too far either to Sir Graham Balfour School, a large, sprawling secondary school in North Avenue. His sisters, Madison and Jaiden, went there, too. Keown, their younger brother, is among the current pupils.

“Morgan always knew he wanted to be a footballer,” says Charlene Chapman, the school’s head of physical education. “He wasn’t arrogant about it — he just knew. But it wasn’t just football; he excelled in every sport. We did basketball, tennis, all sorts. We even tried him on a trampoline.”

Gibbs-White has never forgotten his teachers and presented the school with a signed England shirt after winning the Under-17s’ World Cup in 2017. They have not forgotten him either. The shirt is framed and hangs on a wall inside the reception.

“It’s something special for the school, the students and Stafford, to see someone from the town who has done so well,” says Chapman. “The students see him as a role model — they often talk about him.”

The joke among school staff is how many people in Stafford claim to be one of Gibbs-White’s cousins now he is winning caps with England and playing for a team that is enjoying the view from third place in the Premier League.

At 14, however, his emerging talent meant transferring to Thomas Telford, a Wolves-partnered school in Telford, Shropshire, where the head of football, Des Lyttle, is a former Premier League right-back who spent six years at Forest in the 1990s.

The school had a reputation as one of the best of its kind in the country and Gibbs-White was part of a side that won the English Schools’ FA Cup twice. “It was his first real taste of knockout football and it could get a bit spicy sometimes,” says Lyttle.  “We played against a school in Liverpool once. We had to calm our lads down, their teachers had to calm their lads down. There were several occasions like that.”

Lyttle, previously a coach in the Wolves academy, has worked at Thomas Telford for 12 years and can take pride in more than 150 pupils becoming footballers since the school’s formation in 1991.

But he can laugh, too, about some of the classroom stories that provide an insight into Gibbs-White’s personality.

“I’d get a phone call sometimes, ‘Can you go and find those Wolves boys?’,” says Lyttle. “One time, they were supposed to be in the library. The librarian had rung down to say they had gone missing. There were staff running round the school to find them.

“It turned out they had barricaded themselves into the sports hall. There were five or six of them hiding in a den they had made from floor mats, vaults and other gym equipment. I had to climb through the front of this den to get to them and, as I was going in, they legged it out the back and scarpered through the fire exit.

“I was stuck in this den, almost wetting myself with laughter. I had to try to be serious, of course, but it was so funny. Morgan wasn’t a saint. But it was never anything malicious. He knew right from wrong and when to calm it down. He had a good mentality.”

Gibbs-White was small for his age and, as the other boys shot up, he started to worry he was being left behind. For a while, he feared the worst, being acutely aware that only a tiny percentage of academy players made it as professionals.

It was also getting back to Wolves that some of their boys were testing the teachers’ patience. Scott Sellars, the academy’s head of development, had a meeting with the coaching staff. A decision was made that the relevant group, Gibbs-White included, should be dropped for the academy’s next match.

Sellars had played at the highest level and, as a renowned academy coach, helped to nurture Phil Foden and Cole Palmer through Manchester City’s junior set-up. He knew the hardest part for any talented kid was to have the personality to be accepted in the harsh environs of a first-team dressing room.

Was Gibbs-White ever going to be overawed? It seems unlikely bearing in mind the story of him, aged 16, furiously remonstrating with a player of 21 for not chasing hard enough during a pre-season fixture.

He did, however, need some professional guidance and he has never forgotten his early conversations with Sellars. “I’m going to be hard on you,” the former Newcastle United, Blackburn Rovers and Leeds United player told him. “You might not always like me, or what I’ve said, but hopefully in the future you will come off the pitch after your first-team debut and shake my hand.”

So Gibbs-White knuckled down. He had a specially tailored programme at Thomas Telford that meant training four mornings a week. Then, on the academy pitches at Compton Park, Wolves’ training ground, he began to turn all that potential into something of real substance.

“He was always a talented lad,” says Lyttle. “But there were five or six in his age group who were really talented. Why did Morgan make it? Because he had something a bit different. He had that drive, that desire, that work ethic.”

The staff at Wolves remember how demanding he could be of everyone, coaches included. Gibbs-White, they learned, did not like being substituted. He hated losing even more. But the coaches loved his mentality, the way he drove on his team-mates and how, at the heart of everything, it all came back to his love of the sport.

One story goes back to an under-16s’ fixture against Manchester City, who included Foden, Jadon Sancho and various others who were considered, for their age range, the cream of the crop. They won 10-4. But guess who scored all four Wolves goals?

Not long afterwards, the 15-year-old was selected for an under-18s’ match. The goalkeeper was sent off and, for tactical reasons, Gibbs-White had to be substituted for a replacement No 1.

At that age, however, Gibbs-White was still eligible for the under-16s, who just happened to be losing 4-0 to Newcastle United on the next pitch. Gibbs-White ran over to explain what had happened and asked to go on. He got his wish. Full-time: Wolves 3, Newcastle 4. And, within a year, the star of that team was playing in front of much bigger crowds.

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If you want to know how much Gibbs-White is revered in Nottingham, take a walk over Trent Bridge, with the Forest stadium to your left, and keep to the side of the road where a Banksy wannabe has spray-painted one of the concrete barriers.

It is a picture of Gibbs-White in the fingers-in-ears pose that hardened Wolves fans against a player they used to serenade with chants of “one of our own”.

Look online and you will see T-shirts, posters and sweatshirts being sold with the same image. Inside the City Ground, fans have adapted an old Belinda Carlisle song to proclaim him “the greatest on earth”.

Forza Garibaldi, the Forest supporters group, dedicated a tifo to Gibbs-White before one game last season. He is arguably Forest’s most-watchable player since the 1990s, with his mix of deft touches and pinpoint passes. And there is no doubt about his importance to a team that has emerged as the Premier League’s surprise package.

“I watched Forest’s game against Aston Villa recently and saw him chasing back 50 to 60 yards after giving the ball away,” says Lyttle. “That’s what you call leadership. And Morgan always had that. He wasn’t shy. He’d speak up when it was time to speak up.”

So how did it come that, in the summer of 2022, Gibbs-White decided to sever his ties with Wolves and take his chances with a club that was preparing for its first season in England’s top division for almost a quarter of a century?

A possible clue can be found in one of his tattoos. Gibbs-White has several: a lion on his right leg, a map of Jamaica on his arm (recognising his family heritage on Kirk’s side) while both he and his partner, Britney, have one celebrating the arrival of their 13-month-old son, Graysen.

But it is the tattoos on Gibbs-White’s wrist (reading “Why save the good stuff for later?”) and another on his left thigh (“If you don’t see a clear path for what you want sometimes you have to move it yourself”) that tells us more about his attitude to life.

His debut for Wolves came in an FA Cup tie at Stoke City in January 2017, before Gibbs-White, still only 16, even had his own peg in the first-team dressing room. Paul Lambert had taken the manager’s job and, three days in, watched Gibbs-White star for Wolves under-21s in an EFL Trophy game against Accrington Stanley. They won 4-0 and from that day, Gibbs-White remained with the senior squad.

Nuno Espirito Santo kept him there after replacing Lambert on the upward trajectory that saw Wolves romp to promotion from the Championship, register back-to-back seventh-placed Premier League finishes and reach the Europa League quarter-finals.

“Remember his name”, Gary Lineker told BBC Match of the Day’s viewers after Gibbs-White had made his first Premier League start in November 2018, facing a Chelsea team that included Cesc Fabregas, N’Golo Kante and Eden Hazard. Gibbs-White, then 18, outdid them all and left the Molineux pitch to a standing ovation.

But in the following three years, there were only nine other occasions when Gibbs-White started a top-division fixture. It was a blow to his self-esteem and, behind the scenes at Wolves, they wondered how he would react.

A season-long loan spell with Swansea City in 2020-21 started brightly but ended early after he fractured his foot. Another loan was arranged with Sheffield United, also in the Championship, the following season. And, suddenly, the world seemed a better place.

“That happens sometimes,” says Paul Heckingbottom, then United’s manager. “When young players come through at their clubs, they can end up being the ones who are pushed out, or pushed aside, and it can be more difficult for them to establish themselves.

“Morgan came to Sheffield and, as a footballer, it was good for him. But it was also good for him as a person, (learning about) everything that comes with being a footballer, when you’re in and out of the team, when you’re injured, and being a good team-mate as well as a good player. That’s where he has grown.

“We used to have conversations about it: what are you going to do when you are not picked? How do you deal with it? We didn’t want to take the edge away from him; he just needed to know how to cope when not everything was rosy.”

Gibbs-White won a clean sweep of United’s player-of-the-year awards and when he returned to Wolves, aged 22, some senior staff at Molineux urged the club to shape the team around him.

“If we had gone up that season,” says Heckingbottom, recalling United’s defeat by Forest in the play-offs, “I think our owner, Prince Abdullah, would have moved heaven and earth to try to get him.”

Bruno Lage, who had replaced Nuno, never seemed fully convinced. Wolves signed Goncalo Guedes from Valencia for £27.5million. And Gibbs-White, feeling frustrated and under-appreciated, was acutely aware Steve Cooper wanted him at Forest.

Everton were keen, too. Kevin Thelwell, Everton’s director of football, had previously been at Wolves. Gareth Prosser, Everton’s academy chief, was another ex-Wolves man who had played a big part in Gibbs-White’s development.

Frank Lampard, then Everton’s manager, rang the player and, of course, that held some sway as Gibbs-White counted the former England international among his childhood heroes.

Nobody pushed harder, though, than Cooper in the summer after Forest had won promotion to the Premier League.

He had formed a bond with the player while managing England’s under-17s. It helped, too, that Cooper was Swansea’s manager during Gibbs-White’s loan at the club. Plus Forest had a billionaire owner, Evangelos Marinakis, who liked his teams to play with a classic No 10 and once had five of them at Olympiacos, his Greek club.

The transfer cost Forest £25m, with potential add-ons of £17.5m depending on what seemed at the time to be largely unattainable targets, such as qualifying for the Champions League. And what seemed expensive at the time now looks a bargain.

“I always remember how he (Gibbs-White) prepared in the dressing room before a game,” says Heckingbottom. “He wasn’t one of those players who pretended to be laid-back and chilled out.

“You see other lads with massive earphones on, trying to play it cool, laughing and joking, trying not to appear bothered. But (Gibbs-White) really got focused, he became intense. You could see it in his face. He was prepared to go to war.”

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Angel Gomes has been a big part in Gibbs-White’s life since playing together, aged 14, for England’s under-15s. The two became friends — “a brother I found through football”, says Gomes, the former Manchester United academy graduate — and were England team-mates at virtually every age-level before winning their first senior caps this season.

“What always stood out about Morgan was his mentality,” Gomes, now with French club Lille, tells The Athletic. “When players might be scared in certain moments, or afraid to voice an opinion, he will always let you know how it is.

“There have been times over the years when he has come into the changing room and let people know if things aren’t up to scratch. He’s never scared to voice an opinion. He’s got that drive. And it shows why he has been a captain, and vice-captain, at Forest.”

At other times, team-mates talk about Gibbs-White’s softer touches, how he understands the value of putting an arm round a player’s shoulder and, despite being capable of individual brilliance, how he is a firm believer in the team ethic.

“He’s just as supportive of me as I am of him,” says Gomes. “When we played in the (under-17s’) World Cup, we were alternating from match to match because we played in the same position. You’d think there might have been a rivalry between us, but we respected each other and had that understanding.”

Gibbs-White ended up being picked ahead of Gomes for the final, scoring one of the goals as Spain were beaten 5-2, and justifying the gamble of including him in England’s squad for that tournament.

“Morgan had played only 23 minutes of under-21s football in nine months before he set foot on that trip,” says Jon Alty, the team’s physiotherapist. “He had a stress fracture of his navicular (a bone in the foot). Wolves were brilliant in letting him go because, in my experience, a lot of clubs wouldn’t have let it happen.”

Taking Gibbs-White, in other words, was a big risk. Cooper, however, barely contemplated leaving him at home and that, perhaps more than anything, summed up the bond between manager and player.

“It was a case of, ‘Even if he (Gibbs-White) feels some pain and has to go home and we’re a player down, he’s worth the risk’,” says Alty.

Seven years on, Gibbs-White is taking a leading role in Forest’s almost implausible mission to reach the Champions League, with Wolves their next opponents. He is the player the crowd wants on the ball: always positive, always wanting to go forward.

He is also the first Forest player to win a senior England call-up since Stuart Pearce in 1997. Nuno’s players were at the training ground when the news flashed up on television. Staff joined in with the loud cheers and applause.

“You have to give Steve Cooper a lot of credit as well,” says Gomes. “With Coops, Morgan always felt that love. Coops allowed him to express himself because he knew, by doing that, he would get everything back in return.

“That rejuvenated Morgan. It was a big change for him. He was heading into the unknown but he got that love straight away. That allowed Morgan to express himself and really show his personality.”

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The irony here is that Cooper’s replacement, Nuno, is the manager who seemed reluctant, at times, to give Gibbs-White starts at Wolves.

Yet the Portuguese made it clear in his first news conference that he was happy for Gibbs-White to be the main man. Gibbs-White, he said, was “a father now, a man… more mature. We had him (at Wolves) when he was 16 and it’s great to have him back. He is better now”.

Gibbs-White has registered more Premier League assists than Arsenal’s Martin Odegaard over the last two and a half seasons and has won Nuno’s full trust — “Thank God, he took the path that we all saw he could take, to become a top, top player,” says the Forest manager — and established himself as an ideal stand-in captain if Ryan Yates is not on the pitch.

“He (Gibbs-White) is unbelievably competitive, even off the pitch,” Anthony Elanga, the Forest attacker, says. “When we play head-tennis or padel, he has to win. We went on holiday and had a game of padel. Goodness me! If you are beating him, you are not allowed to leave the court until he is winning.”

At Forest, they talk about Gibbs-White’s development off the pitch and how kind he has been to a seven-year-old cancer sufferer, James Kerry, who he first met in August and saw again recently on a hospital visit.

They also tell the story about Gibbs-White returning home after England had won the Under-21 European Championship in 2023. A group of children were waiting in the street with home-made banners and posters. Gibbs-White was so touched he stopped his car and gave one of the kids his England shirt.

How amazing is this…

Young lads make a sign for Morgan Gibbs-White after winning the u21 EURO’s 🏆🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

What does he do? Turns up to the house, takes photos with the kids, and gives them his shirt!

Class 👏#NFFC #England pic.twitter.com/QTLLbH6is7

— Jamie Martin (@ImJamieMartin) July 9, 2023

Gibbs-White made such an impression on Foden, his room-mate with England’s under-17s, the City player asked him to be a godparent to two of his children.

At Wolves, meanwhile, there are still plenty of people who celebrate Gibbs-White’s achievements and regard him, despite everything, as their star boy. Public enemy number one? Some fans feel that way, perhaps. Yet the academy staff are so proud of Gibbs-White they show parents a video presentation dedicated entirely to his development through their ranks.

His former colleagues laugh about the time the teenager was recovering from a broken metatarsal and word got back to the club that he had been playing five-a-side with some old mates.

But it can be hard sometimes, as you might imagine, for them to see ‘Morgs’ encountering spiteful chants whenever he faces Wolves.

Lots of players get booed when they play against their old clubs. With Gibbs-White, however, everything escalated during a Carabao Cup quarter-final in January 2023 when he scored in a penalty shootout and reacted to the insults by deciding “to give it back” — fingers in ears, blocking out the noise.

Julen Lopetegui, then the Wolves manager, confronted him after the final whistle. Matheus Cunha got involved and stewards had to separate the two sets of players. Both clubs were fined by the Football Association. Resentment festered.

What you might not have seen, however, was the scene after Forest’s 1-1 draw at Molineux last season when he waited by the team bus to hug and greet former colleagues and coaches.

Beginning of End of
the decade the decade pic.twitter.com/03XA8QIv5k

— Morgan Gibbs-White (@Morgangibbs27) December 31, 2019

Gibbs-White had grown up as a Manchester United fan (influenced by his father and grandfather) with posters of Wayne Rooney on his bedroom wall. At Sheffield United, however, he came up against a Derby County side managed by Rooney and was too nervous to introduce himself. So he can be shy, no matter what they say.

Nor has he ever forgotten the Wolves staff who looked after him on the October evening, 2008, when he turned up for his trial, aged eight, in a blue Manchester United shirt with Cristiano Ronaldo’s name emblazoned across its back.

“Nothing ever fazed him,” says Bob Bennett, then the academy’s assistant recruitment officer. “When I see him now, he hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still the same lad — his mannerisms, everything. He’s always had an abundance of character.

“We signed him in the foyer of Aldersley leisure village (the old academy centre) and, once the paperwork was signed, I took him over to my car where we had his first Wolves shirt waiting for him.

“Years later, when I retired at the end of the 2018-19 season, we were at the end-of-season awards night. The first-team group were on one side of the room, I was on the other side. Suddenly, Morgan turned up at my table. He’d heard I was retiring. We had a photograph taken and he told me he’d never forgotten getting his first Wolves kit out of my car.”

Ask Gibbs-White to name his biggest inspirations and he will pick his dad (Kirk now runs his own cleaning company, Drip Clear) and Cyrille Regis, the former West Brom and England striker. Regis, a pioneer for black footballers, had become a family friend. Gibbs-White considered him a mentor and was devastated by his death, aged 59, in 2018.

The player’s mum warrants a mention, too. On Mother’s Day 2020, Leanne received a special gift from her son — a black Range Rover with a pink bow across the bonnet. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for me and our family,” read the accompanying note. “The strength you have is beyond me. My inspiration.”

Gibbs-White remains hugely grateful to key figures in the Wolves academy such as Prosser, Sellars and head of player development Darren Ryan.

As for the scout who discovered him all those years ago, Punter has another cardboard box in his wardrobe containing, among other items, copies of the letters he has sent to Wolves over the last few years.

“I wrote to the club to explain I was the scout who had found Morgan and ask if I could have a bit of recognition,” says the 89-year-old. “I didn’t want money. I used to travel all over the place for Wolves and there was never a wage. I’d get a bit of petrol money to cover my expenses, but I did it as an interest really.

“I would have liked to see Morgan play, though. So I wrote to the club on a few occasions to ask if I could get some tickets. Unfortunately, I never got a reply.”

It is a sad story, but maybe one that will get a happy ending. The Athletic has passed Punter’s details to Forest. He still might get to see Gibbs-White in the Premier League, after all.

Punter leans back in his armchair and smiles. “I’ve seen a lot of lads over the years with ability,” he says. “But this boy was special.”

(Top photos: @Morgangibbs27; PA Images via Getty Images; MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)