Class of '92: Out Of Their League, TV review: Salford's spirited van drivers almost make football look attractive

I swear to God that I saw one of Salford City's dismal squad of non-league players scratch his balls when he and the rest of his team were being harangued after yet another poor performance on the pitch. Sure, we've all seen footballers do that, but I've never seen it done with such emotional power before. The dejected eloquence contained in that one gesture was glimpsed only fleetingly, but memorably so.

Balls, in fact, this two-part series on the fortunes of a non-league club could well have been, especially to a non-sports fan such as me, but I found it enthralling. Football – the people who run it, own it, play it, watch it and pontificate about it – is taken far too seriously. Not by me, though. Before watching this I only dimly knew that the "Class of '92" who'd decided to buy this funny little Salford club were big players in the all-conquering Manchester United squad of that era, but, I admit, I couldn't tell Phil Neville, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes apart. I still can't say which is which.

These lads used to do their talking on the pitch, as they say, but their ambition now is to turn their non-league but proud "community" club into a Premier League success, no less. This is going well, so far as I can tell, and their efforts are heart-warming. Most footie these days is about a foreign owner hiring a foreign manager to order around a random selection of foreign players for the entertainment of foreign fans. Any given player in the Premier League could play for any other club, and so they do. Fine, but how can anyone get worked up about it? And of course there's Fifa and Sepp Blatter (or "Bet Splatter" as one unworldly caller to Radio 4's Any Answers once called him, a curiously apt name, though I digress).

At Salford City, however, the talent, or lack of it, is truly Mancunian and obviously much more so than at its two more storied rivals. SCFC's part-time joint managers, "Jonno" Johnson and Bernard Morley, are still driving a delivery lorry, at less than £100 a week if business is bad. And, although it has these multi-millionaire footballers owning it, Salford relies on dedicated volunteers to keep things going, including the lovely Babs, who has been dishing out the burgers and pies for 26 years. At her kiosk, Polenta and Quinoa might as well be new twin strikers for Real Madrid.

It is a bit trite to go on about how "authentic" all this is, the whole jumpers for goalposts thing. And I wouldn't want to sound too much like the Fast Show character Ron Manager. Not everything was better in the old days – think neglected fire-traps and hooliganism – but there were also some things about the more solidly working-class heritage of football that perhaps we miss now. Watching the amateurish SCFC outfit I thought, to recycle an old cliché, that this is "attractive football", a glimpse of the game's pioneering Victorian days when these now-global superbrands stood, paradoxically, for rather more than they do today. Absurdly, I found myself sharing the managers' frustration when their star striker, Gareth Seddon, said he was going to miss the make-or-break tie with Ossett Town. Rarely can the Evo-Stik League have witnessed such primeval struggle.

This is a team that can be radically affected on the pitch by a night out, and Giggsy, as I believe he was known to his army of Man Utd fans, admitted that the celebratory event they arranged for their protégés may have been unwise: "Twenty lads. A nice hotel. Free booze. Maybe it was a mistake."

In the dressing room Jonno was telling his players to "grow some bollocks and get it right", and I can't imagine Jose Mourinho saying that. Given where he is, maybe he should. How remarkable it would be to see the Chosen One on the way down, somewhere in the third division, passing this pair of Salford van drivers on their way up. As Phil Neville (I think it was him) said: "Spirit can take you a long way." It can even make me interested in football.