Scholes is England’s best player of this generation.
Sends out the wrong message... To whom? Who really cares what message it sends out...?
In the exact same way you are understating the affect selling Rooney would have on our budget. It isn’t “fanciful” to suggest that freeing up £70,000,000 would give us room to operate in the transfer market, of course it would. You seem to have no concept of budgets.
Saying that the club never operates by making significant transfers is ludicrous, when it has to be done then the club will do it. Look at 2007 with Tevez, Anderson, Nani, Hargreaves and the twins all coming in. Everyone can see that our midfield needs improving and given the number of CM’s we have been linked to Moyes presumably sees that as well. Last season our wingers were the worst they have been in as long as I can remember, and it looks like our best winger is going to be sold. There are clear opportunities to improve the squad and selling Rooney would facilitate that happening – hence it is one benefit of the transfer.
Rooney and Scholes are from different generations - hence Scholes being retired when Rooney's at the peak age - and Rooney's clearly the best player of his generation. There's no-one else close.
Who cares? Sir Alex. In the season review from 99/00 he talks about how selling one of our best players (Keane) would send out completely the wrong message which is why we simply had to do everything we can (i.e. break the wage structure) to keep him. The Ronaldo point's a strange one. We did everything we could to keep him for precisely the same reason, but ultimately we couldn't convince him otherwise. As I said if Rooney wants to leave that badly then we'll have to let him go, I'm just saying I completely disagree with his notion of "meh, he's just an unfit, disloyal scouse cnut who's not even
world class, just let him go (without a fight)". Rooney isn't as important as Keane or Ronaldo but he's a still a crucial part of our future in the next few years and a top class footballer and regardless of where he is next year he'll remind people of that quite emphatically.
This is not too dissimilar to the reaction to Tevéz potentially leaving actually. Before the transfer rumours/news came out, 80% of the people thought he was an excellent player while 20% thought he still had a lot to prove he was quite at the top level. After this it must've dropped to about 60-40, and then when he moved to City it must've dropped to about 30-70. People were doubting he'd have as much of an impact without as many world class players covering up his goalscoring deficiencies and that he'd be nothing to worry about. He'd not had the best season with us prior to leaving and scored almost 3x less league goals than the previous year. This anomaly of a season allowed people to convince themselves that Tevéz really isn't quite as good as was portrayed and he wouldn't be much of a loss to us or a huge benefit to City...the parallels here are pretty clear. He then went on to score 43 league goals in 66 league games in the following two seasons - more than any other player in the league. And Rooney is of course a class above Tevéz. Losing him to a title rival would be catastrophic, IMO.
All the permutations about what we could do with that money goes against all previous evidence of how we've coped with losing big players previously. When we let go of Cantona we brought in Sheringham (and later Yorke). When we sold Ronaldo we brought in Valencia. That
is what we do. I think I can just about grasp the complex concept of budgets, thanks. Anyone who thinks they have enough knowledge of our financial situation and how we budget for transfers is kidding themselves though. It doesn't take a genius to recognise that selling Rooney would free up some money. I'm just saying based on pretty much our entire time with Sir Alex in charge we have never used that money freed up in the short-term in the way so many people have suggested. When we got £80m for Ronaldo there were people making the exact same "non-muppet" arguments about how we could spend that £80m sensibly. We didn't spend much of it even in the medium-term. It freed up a bit of wages for us to give our best player a big wage bump but other than that it seemed to have no direct impact at all. We bought players as usual. In fact we bought less "top" players (Hargreaves, Tevez, Berbatov etc.) after we got that money than when we had Ronaldo here and that's my point really. The money we gained from selling him was (somewhat) balanced out by the prestige(/buying power/whatever you want to call it) we lost by selling our best player and reaffirming that Madrid are the more prestigious club. Which is why I quoted "transfer market strength" - it's not the same as financial strength. Of course it would strengthen our financial position but it's too simplistic to say that alone improves our overall "transfer market strength". If we sold Rooney to a rival, well...
I wasn't saying we don't make big signings, of course we do. I'm just saying we don't make big signings as an immediate reaction to losing a big player. Instead we generally take the safer option of a PL-proven player and the logic is obvious. We're losing someone who has proven he can make an impact week in, week out in this team and we're not going to replace him with someone like Lewandowski who has it all to prove. We'll go for someone we can count on to make a consistent contribution in this league to minimise the impact. It's likely we'll make a big signing this summer and I do think it'll be a midfielder, but we'll have budgeted for that already and Rooney leaving is neither here nor there. It'll free up more money but it won't suddenly make us sign a top centre mid. The only way it would is if it then allows/forces us to pay more than we think the player is worth but I'd say that's unlikely.
Is that still the case? How many match winning goals did Rooney score against decent opposition last season for instance?
From what i can recall of the league stats there was just the one occasion when playing an opponent from the top half.
Why does it matter who he scored against? If you take away his goals against "weak" teams we would have finished just one point ahead of Chelsea. Between December 1st and February 2nd his goals alone won us 12 points. In the games v Fulham, Reading and Southampton no-one else looked like scoring and his two goals against City were typical Rooney; I don't think anyone comes close to his goals record v City in recent times.
Scored the first and last goal in a 4-2 win v Stoke (and got a great assist)
Scored in the 84th minute v Braga to make it 2-1 (which Hernández than added to)
Scored two goals v Reading in a 4-3 win
Scored our first two goals v City in a 3-2 win
Scored our only goal v West Ham in a 1-0 win
Scored both of our goals in a 2-1 win v Southampton
Scored our only goal in a 1-0 win v Fulham
Scored a goal in the 2-2 draw with Chelsea
Scored the only goal in a 1-0 win v Reading
