Wayne Rooney’s season has largely mirrored that of his club.
A decent start – Rooney started and scored in Manchester United’s first Premier League game, a 3-1 win at Bournemouth – followed up with a couple of mediocre matches which United won, but probably despite Rooney rather than because of him, followed by a couple of defeats in which Rooney looked well off the pace, and admitted as much.
He has been widely panned for being slow, sluggish and a shadow of his former self.
Just like United.
The England skipper has been at the club since Sir Alex Ferguson splashed out £27million to take him away from Everton after he starred as a teenager at Euro 2004, but is it time for his to call time on his Old Trafford career?
Reports on Tuesday morning claim Jose Mourinho has told his captain that he can look elsewhere if he wants regular first team football.
So, the question is, should he stay or should he go?
Our top two football writers Tony Barrett and Dion Fanning can’t agree on this one:
Why he should stay at United – Tony Barrett
There was a time when any indication that Wayne Rooney might be willing to leave Manchester United would have prompted a slew of offers from the kind of clubs that most footballers dream of playing for.
Now? The best he could hope for is the Chinese Super League or Major League Soccer. There would be no interest from the great and good of the Premier League and no European superpower ready to pay him to decline on their watch.
This is the point at which any idea of leaving United immediately starts to lose its appeal. The only reason for Rooney to go is that things would be better elsewhere and there is nothing to suggest that would be the case.
What would be better than what he has now? United may have lost some of their lustre in recent seasons but it is improbable in the extreme that he would get a better club. With a salary that earns him up to £300,000 per week, a wage increase would not be on the cards unless he went to China.
Presumably the driving force behind any consideration of looking elsewhere would be that by dropping down a level he would play more and enjoy his football more but even that wouldn’t be guaranteed.
Having stated that he will not play for another English club, the romantic notion of him ending his career where it began, at Everton, appears to be off the table. But even if a move to his boyhood club was possible any suggestions that he would rediscover himself at Goodison Park needs to be judged in the context of a seemingly irreversible slump in Rooney’s form which a succession of managers for club and country have been unable to arrest.
(Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Every possibility comes with searching questions about how it would work and when the situation is like that Rooney would be much better served holding onto nurse for fear of worse.
There is no easy way out. He is no longer the solution to most clubs’ problems and they would not be the solution to his. The English transfer market might be increasingly illogical but demand for a former number nine who wants to be a number ten, a number eight or a number six at a stage in his career when his powers are on the wane is unlikely to be great.
The strong likelihood is that any market for Rooney would be dominated by those who see him primarily as a marketing tool, signing him for football reasons would be counter-intuitive at a time when all available logic suggests the football reasons for signing him are weaker than they have ever been.
Which is not to say Rooney does not have anything left to offer; he does. But he has reached the stage of his career when he and United have to accept that his prime has long since passed and he is now in a phase in which playing less can be beneficial to both.
The days of running himself into the ground, often for the benefit of others, have gone and now others need to be running themselves into the ground for him. He remains the most proven Premier League finisher on United’s books and no matter how much his movement has declined it is still more incisive than that of Zlatan Ibrahimovic who continues to render their attack immobile.
(Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)It is not as if Rooney looks at the United squad and sees his route back into the starting line-up blocked by an array of stellar talents. In actuality, those currently ahead of him in the pecking order are either older than he is or much younger than he is but struggling to prove their worth.
Marcus Rashford looks the best long term bet for Jose Mourinho but there are question marks hanging over his other options. In that company, Rooney still has something to offer United but he and they have to work out exactly what that something is.
Why it’s time to leave United – Dion Fanning
If Manchester United’s defeat at Stamford Bridge demonstrated anything, it showed that dropping Wayne Rooney was the easy bit for Jose Mourinho.
United’s problems go far beyond the captain, even if in the early weeks of the season it seemed that dropping him was seen as the solution to all of Manchester United’s problems.
The story that Rooney has been told by Mourinho he must leave if he wants guaranteed first team football in some ways does nothing to advance the situation, while at the same time providing United and Mourinho with an opportunity to take a great leap forward.
Rooney is not in the side at the moment, even if injury kept him out at Chelsea, therefore he is self-evidently not guaranteed first-team football.
Yet letting him go would be a statement as well, and Mourinho likes making those. In 2013, Alex Ferguson revealed that Rooney had asked to leave the club, but it fell to David Moyes to deal with the situation.
Ferguson felt Rooney had “lost some of his old thrust” in his final season, a message which was repeated by Moyes when he took over.
Yet Moyes and United’s response, while Mourinho and Chelsea hovered, was to negotiate a staggering new contract with the player. Rooney was 28, an age which suggested he was at the peak of his career, but the reality was different.
In his autobiography, Ferguson said he found it hard to imagine Rooney with his physique playing for United in his mid-30s, but his late twenties have been the time to mark the decline.
While Rooney as not as bad as currently portrayed and probably doesn’t deserve to be dropped by England when Eric Dier is the alternative, United need to embrace the future.
They are searching for cohesion in midfield and attack and while Mourinho may not be able to provide the answers, it’s clear that Rooney is not the solution.
In some ways, Moyes was in an impossible situation during his time at the club. If he had let Rooney join Chelsea, he was taking the risk that improved performances would increase the pressure on a manager who was always going to be under scrutiny during his first months in the job.
Mourinho doesn’t have the same concerns. If Rooney left, he is likely to go to China or the US – perhaps replacing the returning Steven Gerrard at La Galaxy? – so it isn’t a move that will be exposed as folly.
Ferguson might have dealt with things differently had he stayed in 2013. But as Mourinho deals with the problems at the club, letting Rooney leave would be a simple way of demonstrating who has the power and control at Old Trafford today.
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