Craig Kirby opens the door to his gym, located above a Methodist church north of Rochdale town centre, as his phone buzzes with notifications.
The 50-year-old’s latest TikTok video has just passed 85,000 views, a personal highlights reel filmed from the touchline by his wife Lindsay during one of his amateur matches.
The caption on the video explains how Kirby finds space and time on a bobbly park pitch, adding: “Fitness and movement off the ball are 90% of the game.”
By the time of writing, that particular video had racked up more than 340,000 views, though viral moments are nothing new for the Lancashire midfielder.
The video pinned to the top of his profile has been seen an extraordinary 2.9 million times by people across the world.
That pinned clip is a compilation from a match Whitworth Valley played against Old Rivingtonians on a drizzly January afternoon, set against a backdrop of rolling Lancashire hills and a children’s playground.
Kirby titled the video simply: “Well beaten today,” a modest caption that clearly resonated with millions of viewers who found something compelling in his story.
Since posting some of his earliest content at the beginning of last season, he has continued posting regularly across both TikTok and Instagram, where his ‘Football at 50’ profile has around 30,000 followers on each platform.
The story behind the social media journey is deeply personal, as Kirby had considered quitting football altogether following the death of his son Sebastian in December 2023.
His wife encouraged him to keep playing and offered to film his matches, with the couple thinking only a handful of family and close friends would ever watch the footage.
“I put it on and it went to over one million views,” Kirby explains. “We were like: ‘Wow?!’ Lots of things have happened since and it has made me reevaluate.”
Kirby is a genuinely talented footballer, having had trials at Blackburn Rovers as a teenager before choosing to follow his father into the army instead.
After leaving the army in his mid-twenties, opportunities arose at Cambridge United and Kettering, but none that could adequately support his young family at the time.
His hair is noticeably whiter now, setting him apart visually from the younger players he lines up against on park pitches across the region each week.
Working as a personal trainer, Kirby has maintained an impressive physique and says he is currently doing sprint training with the specific aim of becoming quicker this season.
