Having long been knocked off its perch, Liverpool used the weekend to consolidate the knocking off of Manchester United from its own large-scale construction, completing a hobbling league double at Old Trafford on Sunday.
That defeat meant that for David Moyes there’s not even the dignity of a Champions League place to play for any more, just grimy, Europa League disappointment. Under Moyes, United can be said to be moving in two interlinking directions. These are: downwards, and towards the fetishisation of Wayne Rooney.
One persuasive theory about Moyes has been that he does not possess a plan. United haven’t looked cohesive since he took over the club. His team has looked like a collection of whims, pieced together by a manager who seemed himself the ultimate whim, his successor having placed him in charge without any great explanations to hand.
But I’m no longer convinced there is an absence of a plan at United. There is a plan. It’s just that the plan is Rooney, which, to be fair to anyone who missed it, can very often take on the appearance of being no plan at all.
My argument is that much of what we are seeing right now from United makes more sense when Rooney’s role in it all gets the examination it deserves. As we see how ludicrously central he’s become at the club, we see how much damage that’s potentially doing.
“Central” is a decent place to start with this. That’s where Rooney played on Sunday, at the expense of Juan Mata, the £40million man, who was pushed wide for the sake of Rooney’s creative instincts in the number ten position. As you will no doubt be aware, quite a few people in this team are pushed somewhere for the sake of Rooney’s creative instincts in the centre of the pitch.
Soccer Central podcast: SPORTSNET.CA’s Soccer Central podcast, hosted by John Molinaro and James Sharman, takes an in-depth look at the beautiful game and offers timely and thoughtful analysis on the sport’s biggest issues. To listen and subscribe to the podcast, CLICK HERE.
Mata, the most consistent assist-maker in the Premier League for the last two seasons, so far plays quietly from the right or the left at United. Similarly, the midfield is left as an overloaded two-man operation very often against three-man equivalents. Likewise, Robin van Persie reckons he’s had to adjust his runs. All of this because Moyes likes Rooney behind his striker.
Few players could justify so many moves to accommodate them and Rooney simply isn’t one of them. Of his 12 assists in the league this season, the most substantial genre he’s evoked is dead-ball specialist, and for all the talk of a personally productive few months, his return of assists also represents only three more than Mesut Ozil.
As United’s main on-pitch plan, which he undoubtedly, intentionally is under Moyes, Rooney is at best a risky bet—both because of his individual ability and because of his impact on the huge talent around him.
And if the numbers lie, they actually lie in Rooney’s favour. Against Liverpool on Sunday he looked as unwieldy as we’re used to seeing by now, hardly justifying his tactical status. After 60 minutes, he received the ball on the edge of the Liverpool area, controlled it, then waited and waited more. For the great playmakers, at moments like this, time seems to stand still; in the case Rooney on the edge of the Liverpool area, only he did, and, obviously, he was dispossessed.
It went on like that all afternoon. In between pinging predictable cross-field passes, Rooney seemed at times to be pre-emptively admiring his creative genius, only to have the moment of actual genius cruelly taken away by defenders less accommodating than his manager.
Against Liverpool he played like a man who believes his own hype, which is no coincidence, given how his club has treated him off the pitch too—indulged as the centre of the known universe there as well.
Not only has his manager insisted that Rooney operates as his playmaker—at the expense of others and, I reckon, the team as a whole—he’s also given him a £300k a week contract, the promise of the captaincy and access to transfer plans. He has been given absolutely everything anyone could think of to prove that he is United’s complete priority: its whole plan for the future based around him.
Does this really play well with the other egos at the club? Other people get sacked when they say that they don’t like their co-workers, but Rooney gets asked who he’d prefer to work with. The message: Ferguson’s replacement as Top Dog at United wasn’t Moyes, it was you, Wayne. Moyes, with a little help from those around him, has allowed the entire club to revolve around his number ten and the results of that have been drawn up in a handy league table.
Even last summer’s transfer policy became about keeping Rooney more than signing the midfielders or defenders whose absences are now being lamented. From the start of the Moyes Experience, it’s been all about Rooney and it’s been costing the manager all along.
There’s easily enough evidence to call Rooney’s positioning at United a fetish, representative of a disproportionate degree of affection for an object not deserving of said affection. He’s not a rubbish player, but the marginalisation of everything else at such a massive club relative to him can’t be justified on even that club’s own terms.
Making Rooney The Plan has definitely happened and it definitely hasn’t worked, because his talent simply doesn’t justify it.
There is of course still the argument that Alex Ferguson did something similar with Rooney already once—indulged him after his first transfer request in 2010 and went on to win the title. But, crucially, Ferguson was Ferguson. Moyes has to play by real people rules, and by those rules a Rooney fetish is as unhealthy as it sounds.
Far healthier, perhaps—if you must fetishise someone, David—would have been to pick Van Persie, a man who gave winning the league single-handedly a good go last season. He appeared to have the talent to carry Manchester United all on his own. Instead, last week, he found himself reassuring United fans he didn’t want to leave the club, and we all know what that meant when he told Arsenal fans the same thing.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.