The caf said that Rooney is the worst player in the squad, not even a championship level player, contributes nothing, can only pass to Valencia, we would play better with 10 men than with him in the team, etc. It is not clear if those are still true if he isn’t club captain, paid much less than 300k/week, and didn’t hold the club to ransom twice.
In any case however, his stats don’t seem to support such view, so how was it that such a shite player can have such decent stats compared to his team mates, could it be because of pure luck due to his lucky goals, fake assists, or weak oppositions? We have our own opinions on that, but here are the numbers, for forwards and midfielders only:
We won 16 of the 23 matches with Rooney in the starting lineup, for a win ratio of 70%, below only Mata. Our win ratio without Rooney starting for us is 50% (19 of 38). Rooney started in 13 league matches and 10 non-league matches, and he didn’t pick the matches he played. If we play better without Rooney in the squad like everybody said, then it’s not reflected in the results of the 61 matches that we have played so far.
Rooney is the second highest contributor of goals and assists for us, with less starts than most of the others. The argument for lucky goals and fake assists may be used against his quality, but not his contribution, at least for the goals, as they are counted all the same. Even if we take out half of his assists, the remaining numbers still do not reflect a useless and worst player in the squad.
Another curious thing is that he started in 5 of our 6 highest scoring matches when we scored 4 goals, which were against Fenerbahce, Feyenord, West Ham, Reading and Wigan. The only exception was against Leicester when we scored 3 goals from corners. It seems that playing with 10 men did not hinder us to play well after all.
He may be finished as a top level footballer, he is surely finished with us as Jose doesn’t trust him anymore, he is beyond any doubt finished as a 300k/week player, but one should know the numbers above while saying that he contributes nothing or calling him the worst player in the squad.