Wayne Rooney was too intelligent and subtle for English football

“Just watched some family guys. Peter griffin is hilarious. Haha. Shapoppi”

– Wayne Rooney

If you look at the headline numbers, Wayne Rooney is pretty inarguably one of the greatest attackers to be born in England in the post-war era. Third most goals in the Premier League. Second most capped England player and second highest scorer. Six Premier League titles and one Champions League medal. You name it, he did it. And yet he can leave people cold. He clearly achieved more on paper than someone like Steven Gerrard, but that other Liverpool-born superstar seems to inspire stronger feelings in people (even dislike and mocking from rival fans).

He never quite had his defining moment, his “I was there when” game. His England side didn’t come close to expectations, but that hasn’t dramatically tainted Gerrard’s legacy. He was a great player, but not the one his country expected. The problem, I think, was simple: for a nation that loves blood and guts, Roy of the Rovers style heroics, Rooney was too complex and nuanced to be appreciated.

Yes, the guy who says “erm” all the time and likes Mr. Bean. That Wayne Rooney.

People knew what they wanted Rooney to be. He broke onto the scene at age 16 with a swagger and confidence you’d need to have if you’re going to play against grown men at that age. He could drop deep as a second striker and looked comfortable taking players on. He spoke with a thick Scouse accent which, fairly or not, conveys working class connotations to most in the UK. He was supposed to be a street footballer, unbound by tactical chains and academy-coached perfectionism. He even had a TV series called Wayne Rooney's Street Striker. He might not always be the neatest or most precise, but by god he’d do something to win the game. That’s what everyone thought he would be.

But that was never quite him. “My first meeting with him”, Alex Ferguson wrote in his autobiography, “contradicted my expectation that he would have an assertive personality. He was a shy boy”. This was after two years of playing every week for his boyhood club and a performance at Euro 2004 that made him not just the talk of his own country but the name exciting everyone in European football. And he was at a meeting to talk about joining Manchester United for the highest ever teenaged transfer fee. He had everything he could possibly want at age 18, and he was a shy boy.

Man Utd were in arguably their weakest point during the Ferguson era (barring the early years) when signing Rooney. They finished the 2003/04 season in third place, well behind unbeaten Arsenal but, arguably more ominously, short of newly wealthy Chelsea. The Blues were about to spend big again alongside hiring José Mourinho. United, meanwhile, were in an awkward spot, having failed to properly revitalise the side after winning the treble in 1999. They broke the bank for Rooney seeing him, alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, as the start of something new. It’s just that no one knew what that would look like.

Rooney arrived very late in the transfer window, and Man Utd didn’t really “need” another striker. Louis Saha had arrived the previous January and looked sharp, while Ferguson added Alan Smith from Leeds earlier that summer. I don’t imagine either player had been thrilled to find out Rooney was coming. Rooney would have to slot into a team that wasn’t built for him. That meant playing wide at times, feeding others and, more broadly, becoming a facilitator.

When Ruud van Nistelrooy left United in 2006, Ferguson built the team around Ronaldo going forward. In hindsight, that seems pretty inevitable, but it felt radical and utterly modern at the time to build the attack around a wide player. The old structured 4-4-2 was binned for a version that became all about getting it to Ronaldo wherever he wanted it. Rooney, then, became the second threat. He would have to respond to Ronaldo’s movements, rather than vice versa. He became an ideal “second best player”, doing the hard and complicated bits so someone else could shine. It was brilliant, but it just wasn’t what everyone wanted from him.

It certainly wasn’t what the national team wanted. After sparkling at Euro 2004, England really struggled to figure out what to do with him. International football is a dumber and more basic version of the sport, and Rooney’s increasingly nuanced style of play didn’t fit with that. Sven-Göran Eriksson tried various different systems in his last two years in charge, none of them quite able to fit the pieces together. Rooney was rushed back from injury at the 2006 World Cup, so his performance can largely be forgiven. But he couldn’t find his rhythm at all under Steve McClaren. England collectively had problems at this time, and many kept turning to Rooney as a figure to pick the team up by the scruff of his neck and win games himself. That just wasn’t ever him.

United sold Ronaldo in 2009, setting up Rooney for what would be his most widely praised season. I’m not sure he really became better at football so much as Ferguson just played him as a conventional striker. In the previous three years, he averaged 13 league goals and 9 assists per season. In 2009/10, without Ronaldo, he scored 26 goals and assisted just 3. Everyone loved it. He was doing “proper” things as a real striker, staying in the box and putting the ball in the net. It wasn’t exactly the street footballer role once imagined, but it was a profile that English fans understood and respected.

That was, narratively speaking, Rooney’s season. He won both the players’ and football writers’ player of the year awards. At age 24, he was coming into his apparent peak years and getting recognised as the Premier League’s best footballer. It seems ludicrous to say this about someone who had already done so three times by this point, but he needed to win the league title that season. The previous three could be credited to Ronaldo. Rooney needed “his” title in “his” year. United fell short to Chelsea by a single point, and Rooney didn’t get his crowning moment.

A poor World Cup performance, in which he seemed at disconnect with what Fabio Capello wanted from him, suddenly put Rooney in a downward spin. That was supposed to be “his” England team, but Rooney wanted to score goals as a striker while Capello saw him as a classic number ten. After a season of playing as a nine every week, he seemed to find it hard to move into a deeper role. Capello should have made a tactical switch to put Rooney upfront, especially when England lacked another quality striker, but the damage was done and it hurt the player’s reputation badly. Rooney “didn’t show enough passion” or whatever. Moaning about the fans directly to the camera didn’t help, admittedly.

He had a poor start to the season at Man Utd before regaining some good form, but this time as a second striker behind either Dimitar Berbatov or Javier Hernández. His 11 goals and 11 assists was a perfectly good return, but not that of a “main man” as he had been the previous season. United won the title again that year, but with Rooney as a cog in the team rather than the superstar. Things flipped back around in 2011/12, with Ferguson deploying him as a goalscorer again, and he really earned a lot of plaudits. That was probably his last chance to get that crowning achievement. United lost the title in the last minute of the season to that Sergio Agüero goal and the narrative was written. If Agüero hits the side netting, it’s Rooney’s title.

And that was kind of that. I don’t think United necessarily wanted to change Rooney’s role the following year. Ferguson signed Shinji Kagawa in June 2012, presumably thinking that certain games would use the Japanese number ten behind Rooney upfront. But then Robin van Persie became available and Ferguson just couldn’t resist signing him. Once they signed him, United were always going to build the attack around Van Persie, pushing Rooney back into the facilitator role he played alongside Ronaldo. That season, Rooney actually had a slightly better rate of non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes than the new signing, but that’s not how narratives work. Van Persie (in a rare season of good fitness) started 35 league games to Rooney’s 22. Van Persie scored three penalties, which isn’t a huge number, but it was the margin that got him the Golden Boot ahead of Luis Suárez that year. Van Persie had the narrative. In the popular imagination, the Dutchman came to United and won them the title, while Rooney stuttered a little bit. There were growing tensions behind the scenes and, had Ferguson not retired that summer, he may well have sold Rooney.

Man Utd, you might have noticed, have not won a league title since Ferguson retired. Rooney’s five winners’ medals are a more than reasonable haul, but he won the “wrong” titles. None were won during seasons when he was widely regarded as the team’s best player. He didn’t have that defining campaign, that year when we all remember “Rooney won it”. When Ronaldo left Real Madrid, Karim Benzema was then able to claim several major trophies as “his” in the popular imagination. When Ronaldo left Man Utd, Rooney didn’t quite pull off the same trick.

Whenever I bring up his international career online, Man Utd fans who I suspect did not watch too many England games from that era claim it’s ridiculous to question his 120 caps and 53 goals. I see their point, but I think it needs some context. He had an incredibly bright start to his England career, emerging during the Euro 2004 qualifiers and shining in the tournament itself. Then, by his own admission, things took a wobble. After getting four goals in the group stages of Euro 2004, he did not score in a competitive game for England again for over three years, finally breaking his duck in a 3-0 win over Estonia in October 2007. England did not qualify for Euro 2008, so he was pretty widely scapegoated as another who failed to reproduce his club form for the national team.

I don’t think any one individual was responsible here, but he was certainly part of the “golden generation” that became widely disliked by the public for underwhelming results. Rooney was England’s best player as they dominated their 2010 World Cup qualifying group but, well, no one remembers the qualifiers, so it didn’t count for anything once he underwhelmed in South Africa. He had a decent enough Euro 2012 qualifying run totally ruined by his red card in the final game, which saw him miss the first two matches of the tournament itself. He scored once in those Euros, playing ok in a very dull and functional side. Roy Hodgson was now the manager, and Rooney did actually score a lot of goals in this era. England were a disaster at the 2014 World Cup such that it was impossible to give anyone any credit, while by Euro 2016 he looked worse for wear and probably needed to be dropped, which happened pretty quickly afterwards. Rooney’s England career has a whole lot of asterisks attached. I couldn’t really argue he’s in the same conversation as someone like Harry Kane, who has performed in multiple tournaments.

England needed him to be their best player when he had become so expert as a facilitator. In some alternate universe where Michael Owen never gets injured, Rooney probably performs this job brilliantly. Across his career, he did most things right without getting those defining moments or narratives that are basically all football culture cares about. I wouldn’t say Rooney is an enigma, but he’s a quieter, more nuanced player than anyone wanted. He looks and sounds like a street footballer, but that “street” is the private pathway outside some modern training ground. He’s too cultured for his stereotype. He’s the thinking man’s street footballer.

Just try watching some better TV next time, Wayne.