A statue of one of the legends of Leigh rugby league, rather than Sir Matt Busby's Holy Trinity, dominates the concourse at Manchester United Women's home ground, 15 miles from Old Trafford, where autograph hunters were in short supply on Friday as the players walked to the neighbouring leisure centre.
But there's nothing low key about the next eight days for the team which United belatedly announced it was forming, 12 months ago. They took the plunge in women's football's second tier last August, not wanting to risk an inaugural season of struggle in the elite league. But it has not been plain sailing.
The top two go up, and United simply have to secure promotion first time. Anything less would be humiliating for a side whose budget far outweighs anything in the division.
United have six games to go and are second, two points behind Tottenham, who have played a game more. Third-placed Charlton have given everyone a run for their money, and United face the two sides in the space of little more than a week.
With their regular 2,000 home crowds, a songbook of anthems and the general impression — flawed, according to manager Casey Stoney — that they have a huge budget, they have discovered soon enough how it feels to be the side everyone wants to beat. They faced a physical Durham side on Astroturf and lost.
The story of these last 12 months is a little more nuanced than one of the world's biggest brands splashing the cash about. United's bid to join the FA Women's Championship, lodged in February last year, was formally accepted by the governing body a mere four weeks before the start of the season, leaving Stoney to embark on a concentrated recruitment campaign. Three players arrived in the last 24 hours, but it was not purely an exercise in hoovering up players from clubs like Everton, Juventus and Doncaster Belles.
'They've developed players too,' says Lucy Ward, the former Leeds and England defender, now an analyst for the BBC and BT Sport. Five of the players United recruited were 18. The average age in some games has been 21. Kirsty Hanson, Jess Sigsworth, and Charlie Devlin were part-timers. All have improved.
'We went in at tier two because we wanted to let the players play out of the spotlight for a year,' says Stoney, 36, who earned 130 caps for England.
'This is a huge club and some of them are coming out of part-time football into full-time. It gives them a year to adjust and us, as a club, a year to make sure that when we go up we're ready.
'We've been accused of having a huge budget. We haven't got a huge budget. We haven't got a budget anywhere near what Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City have got. Nowhere near it. What we've done is use our budget wisely with our players.'
Neither she nor the club will disclose what the budget is.
An inaugural season of struggle in the WSL certainly did not bear thinking about for a club whose reputation within the women's game had not been good. The club had a women's team in the past yet disbanded it in 2005 when the sport was yet to establish itself. There had been a youth programme at United, funded through the club's foundation, which receives much of its income from Premier League central funds.
But England's Izzy Christiansen, now at Manchester City, and Everton's England international Gabby George had to leave to forge careers. Katie Zelem, who went to Juventus via Liverpool, was one of Stoney's signings.
The feeling always seemed to be that United were not interested because a women's team could not contribute to the money-making juggernaut. The last 12 months have demonstrated otherwise.
Three of Stoney's players appeared with Paul Pogba, Juan Mata and Marcus Rashford on a sophisticated video marking Remington's sponsorship of United. Kohler also sponsor the men and women. A number of executive boxes are in use when United play home games at Leigh in the town's Sports Village.
But Saturday's visit to Charlton reveals the gulf between where United are and where they want to be. The home team's pitch is little more than a roped piece of ground. Promotion means an advance from a world of part-timers and half-empty grounds to what will be the newly minted Barclays WSL, with £500,000 prize money and a substantially greater profile.
'It's an even bigger incentive now,' reflects Stoney. 'There was no pressure from the club to go up in year one. They stated that from the start. But it would be a massive disappointment not to go up. We want to go up as champions. The players will tell you that promotion is not enough.'