Rooney was unhappy about Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure to Real Madrid, unconvinced by the arrival of Chris Smalling and reluctant to stick around if City, two years into their Abu Dhabi ownership, were the future of English football. He was in the midst of new contract negotiations at the time and when he took part in Gary Neville’s Soccerbox on Sky Sports last year he made no bones about the fact he had openly questioned the manager.
“I was gutted when he (Ronaldo) left. I went in to see Alex Ferguson. I said to him, ‘What’s going on? We’ve sold Tevez, we’ve sold Ronaldo, who’s coming in?’ No disrespect, but we had bought Smalling not knowing whether (he was) good enough. If I was going to commit myself for another five years, I didn’t really want to be waiting to be part of Alex Ferguson building a team to get there in five years’ time.”
Rooney certainly had some front: he also asked Ferguson for an explanation about why United had not challenged Real Madrid for the signing of Mesut Ozil from Werder Bremen. “My reply was that it was none of his business,” Ferguson clarified in his book. “I told him it was his job to play and perform. My job was to pick the correct teams. And so far I had been getting it right.”