Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford helps raise more than £20m for charity donating food to vulnerable children

England forward set an initial target of £100,000 after making a sizeable donation himself, only for the nation’s leading supermarkets to become involved and help the total number of children being delivered food soar

Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford has revealed the FareShare charity he has teamed up with has raised more than £20m to feed vulnerable children.

Rashford initially threw his support behind the scheme that provides food to children who depend on school dinners while they are at home in lockdown, with the England forward making his own sizeable donation last month.

His generous donation saw a £100,000 target identified to help those at risk of going hungry, but the interest in the FareShare project soared as a number of supermarkets got involved.

Tesco donated £15m worth of food to the scheme, while Asda gave £2.5m and the Co-op donated £1.5m. Both Pret A Manger and Pizza Express have also contributed, and Rashford has revealed how the total number keeps escalating the longer that lockdown goes on to exceed what they dreamt was possible.

“It's done a lot better than what we thought and what it actually started off with,” Rashford told the Manchester United Podcast. “It was a slow process at first and we just set it at trying to get to £100,000 and a couple of days passed and we were way past that and then a week passed and the numbers just kept getting higher and higher.

“It got to a stage where we actually had a lot of donations, more than we expected, and we were struggling to actually deliver the food to people, so that's where the bigger companies like Tesco, Co-op, Asda, they've come in and helped us massively with deliveries on that side of things and also put in their own large donations as well.

“I think it's just around £20m now. It's a big number. At first the donations were going kind of slow. I put a bit of money in myself and it was at £50,000, £60,000, and I just remember two days later it was at £140,000 and then a week after that it was at £6m-£7m, after some of the bigger companies started coming in.

“Just two or three days ago it reached £20m.”

The 22-year-old also explained where his desire to help vulnerable children stems from, given it would have been himself needing the donations during his childhood as his family relied on school dinners.

“We don't know how long this is going to go on for, and it's just something that, if this had happened 10 or 15 years ago, it definitely would have affected myself in the position I was in when I was a kid, so it was just something that I thought if there's a way to try and help people and kids especially then let's just try and do it."