You have to wonder whether it was merely by coincidence that Jose Mourinho expressed his lack of interest in Wayne Rooney’s future exactly 24 hours after the teenager had occupied no fewer than 13 pages of Sunday’s News of the World.
Not that Rooney had done anything wrong to earn his prominence. This wasn’t ‘Rat Hugh Used And Abused Meâ€, ‘Big Bruv Victor Is Drug Dealerâ€, ‘Abi’s New Sex Video Shame†or, more to the point, ‘Gazza: My Secret Cocaine Hellâ€, which were the front-page headlines in the News of the Screws over successive weekends last month. By contrast, the Everton and England prodigy’s splash was chastely headlined: ‘Rooney: My Love for Coleenâ€.
If they’re not stitching you up, of course, they’re buying you up, and the story behind the newspaper’s ‘world exclusive†was a fee substantial enough to ensure that Rooney relegated Maria Sharapova — a much better story on Sunday morning, particularly to a paper such as the News of the World — to a single column on page one and a spread on pages six and seven.
In consideration for whatever it was the paper paid him, the 18-year-old Rooney and his fiancée sat down with a reporter and spilled the goods about their life together. It was unexceptional — and unexceptionable — stuff. About how he fell for Coleen while mending her bike chain. About how their first night together had been spent at a Liverpool hotel on St Valentine’s Day. About how he had proposed on a garage forecourt. About the tattoo that confirms their love (sorry, this stuff is catching).
After five pages concentrating on their romance, an eight-page pull-out supplement concentrated on Rooney’s memories of Euro 2004, including the information that Claude Makelele annoyed him by standing on his foot, that the players each had a single room, and that he had chosen to swap his shirts not with Zinedine Zidane or Luis Figo but with David Beckham and Steven Gerrard.
All this was reinforced on the paper’s editorial page by a short third leader concluding: ‘Despite his millions, hero Wayne Rooney hasn’t forgotten the family, friends or neighbours who helped him when he had nothing. The boy with the golden boot has a 24-carat heart, too.â€
Harmless stuff, in itself. But what may have given pause to anyone thinking of investing the £30-million that Everton’s chief executive recently named as the minimum figure for Rooney’s signature is what this says about the way the player’s career is being handled.
It would be interesting, for example, to share Sir Alex Ferguson’s thoughts. The two players to have grown from adolescence to superstardom at Old Trafford during Ferguson’s tenure are Ryan Giggs and Beckham. Initially, Ferguson discouraged the media’s approaches to both players.
Giggs went along with Ferguson’s strategy, and seems to have reaped the benefit in a quiet, well ordered and highly successful private life, to go with his continuing contribution, at the age of 30, on the pitch.
Beckham chose the other option. In essence, his decision to build his life around courting publicity represented a wilful denial of Ferguson’s wisdom and wishes, and eventually the manager was pleased when Real Madrid came along waving a massive cheque.
The decision of Rooney’s advisers — presumably including his agent, Paul Stretford of ProActive sports management — to give him such exposure at this stage of his career clearly runs counter to the way Ferguson prefers to protect his young players.
Even the 19-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, for all his diamond ear studs, appears to lead a quiet life off the pitch, much to his manager’s satisfaction.
To the outside eye, Rooney’s career appears to need particularly careful handling. On the ball, his confidence appears unshakeable. In other areas of life a teenager earning more in a week than most people take home in a year may need a degree of guidance, particularly when his temperament appears to contain an element of combustibility.
And then there is the indisputable fact that, for all his four goals in four appearances for England in Portugal, he failed to make double figures over the course of a full season for Everton last year. During Euro 2004, Thierry Henry remarked that he thought he had looked uninterested in league football.
Perhaps Rooney is indeed a one-off, to whom the normal laws do not apply. Perhaps he needs the environment of a really big club in which to flourish. Those 13 pages in the News of the World, however, and what they said about the priorities of those around him, certainly nourished the seed of doubt. —