Stobzilla
Adores babies
I doubt Rooney would want to leave because he feels threatened by Kagawa and van Persie. At the end of the day the other attacking options for the front four are Young, Valencia, Nani, Welbeck and Hernández and Rooney will feel he'll have no problem getting in ahead of them. We're going through the exact same bizarre scenario where Rooney echoes many fans' thoughts yet gets lambasted for it. In 09/10 we lost the title and a chance at getting into a historic third CL final in a row purely because of Rooney's injury. There's no doubt he would have wanted us to bring in another top, top player that's capable of winning games on his own to compensate for any time Rooney's not able to. We know this because all players want the team to improve and Rooney has no problems playing a supporting role - as Giggs and many others have since said.
In the 2010 summer loads of people questioned (not criticised) the club's ambition in exactly the same way. We'd sold Ronaldo and Tévez, Berbatov was the only big signing and he didn't come off, Valencia was doing a good job but couldn't replace what we lost. As a consequence our football gradually began to become more stale and people questioned what we were doing to change that and there were no top players on the horizon. People were complaining about Sir Alex's comments about "value" and asking whether that lack of value in the market would mean we were ruling ourselves out of signing the best of the best. It doesn't mean that Rooney was right to do what he did. Of course he wasn't. I just think it makes him a bit of an idiot and/or knee jerk fool who should've known to trust his manager, much like millions of fans and players across the world. It doesn't make him a cnut, just misguided.
Even last summer Sir Alex continued to voice concerns over things like Hazard going to Chelsea because they were willing to pay the agent an extra £5m+ on top or Lucas going to PSG for an extortionate amount. Sir Alex looks at the long-term development of these things but players generally aren't the "visionary" types. They just see top players seemingly rejecting more prestigious, successful, stable clubs for the "ambitious project" at a sugardaddy club year after year. It can all build up to create a picture that the sugardaddy clubs are the ones that are progressing while we're sitting on our hands watching Ronaldo and Tévez excelling at Madrid and City and the players begin to wonder what can be done to turn things around. The sugardaddy clubs are signing the top players that we want, the glamour clubs are taking the top players we already have and we're priced out of even making moves for young, developing players like Lucas. Rooney thought the way to turn it around was to make a marquee signing but fast forward a few months however and we've just reached the CL final, and Rooney is reminded that with Sir Alex in charge we'll always challenge. That alone will have shown him he was well off the mark to question the club's ambition but questioning how the club was going to achieve it seems entirely reasonable. Sir Alex seems to have agreed that something needed to change. Fast forward another 12 months and the club's just bought a rival player for the first time in decades and that rival player happens to be the best player in the league. Not only that but Sir Alex is talking about significant changes in our transfer strategy:
Maybe Sir Alex shared Rooney's thoughts all along that another top player was needed in there alongside him but he took a more patient, long-term view of things or maybe the van Persie opportunity just conveniently popped up and changed Sir Alex's perspective but either way it goes some way to justifying Rooney's (short-sighted) feelings at the time. If things had continued to go the same way with the sugardaddy clubs signing up every top player going then City would have signed van Persie and they'd have won back-to-back titles and Rooney's fears would come true. There's nothing wrong with asking the question about where you want to be in your career in a few years' time and asking whether you can achieve those goals. That's how we got the new crowd favourite van Persie. Yes his worries were more justified but why should that alone be the difference between being the club's new favourite player and being the club's most maligned player? Rooney turned down City's millions too. And part of the reason van Persie decided to come here was because we were offering him a wage that reflects our belief that he's one of the best players in the world. The way people talk about Rooney and van Persie is worlds apart and yet there's only one significant difference: van Persie did all these things that we find so detestable to a club besides us.
Perhaps with Sir Alex leaving these same fears are popping up. God knows he wouldn't be alone in that sense. At this point his three main priorities will simply be money, playing well and winning things. He's at a point in his career when he's preparing to sign his last huge contract and commit the rest of the peak of his career to the club and he will have to ask himself where is the best place for him to satisfy all three needs/desires. He'll have to ask himself if he thinks United can stay competitive following such a huge change. He'll have to ask himself if he (like many people his age, e.g Henry, Vieira) needs a move after so many years at the same club to get the best out of himself after an underwhelming, injury-hit last season. He'll have to ask himself whether making a bit of extra money at the end of his career comes before either of these things. These are the kinds of questions that Keane asked at the same age. Chances are Giggs was asking himself the same questions too. All we can do is hope he makes the right decision, because ultimately a Rooney-van Persie partnership on top form is the most devastating pair in the world and would surely be at the heart of further successes regardless of who's in charge.
Of course, there's every chance Rooney hasn't even considered leaving and this is just pure conjecture from a couple of tabloids. Whether there's any truth to the story is irrelevant because there's so much hysteria over what comes next at United that people don't know what to believe. This is a perfect time for the media to take advantage of the uncertainty this has caused to create an endless supply of sensational stories, and Rooney's obviously an easy target for that. He has previous, he's just after having an unusual season where he's been dropped for big games and he's one of those players that could conceivably be linked with any club in the world. It's a story that was always going to come out regardless of whether it was rooted in truth.
Great post.
