Maybe he is not a No. 9 anymore but he will never, with me, be a No. 6. He will never be 50 metres from the goal.”
And that’s that. With just one quote, Jose Mourinho hammered the final nail into the coffin of the frankly ridiculous notion that Wayne Rooney could be transformed into a Premier League midfielder. No openings for debate. No beating around the bush.
“For me, he will be a No. 9 or a No. 10, or a number nine and a half, but with me he will never be a No 6, not even a No. 8”.
Closure.
Except, with Mourinho no doubt hoping to lay to rest the numerous questions over where Wayne Rooney can be the most productive, he has in fact opened up more questions regarding the future, if any, Rooney has at Manchester United under Mourinho.
By categorically ruling out Rooney’s impact anywhere on the pitch besides the attacking third, he hands a monumental level of pressure on Rooney to once again find his goalscoring touch—a touch that has been slowly abandoning him over the previous seasons.
Goals have been increasingly difficult to come by for Rooney these previous seasons, so much so that the striker himself admitted he had always “expected to become a midfielder” and hoped to emulate United great Paul Scholes. Small difference of course being that Scholes spent his entire career carving himself out as one of the greatest midfielders of the Premier League era; a drop back within a midfield system was always going to be easier for a Scholes than it ever would be for a Rooney.
The declaration of his intended path into midfield cries arrogance. An arrogance of defeatism that the day his goalscoring exploits desert him he could freely move into midfield, at the expense of a genuine midfielder, and pick up the ball-winning and playmaking responsibility in the most seamless way possible.
He couldn’t.
You could make the case that Rooney had to play. In what was a disastrous spell in charge for Louis van Gaal, permanently dropping the captain, the highest wage earner, and heir to the highest goalscorer in Manchester United’s history crown would have been career suicide. Once he began struggling in front of goal, and with the emergence of a genuine goalscoring talent in Marcus Rashford, moving him into midfield could be seen as a masterstroke rather than a desperate attempt to make Rooney into something he never was or would be.
Going into the 2016-17 season where does this leave Rooney?
Mourinho has clearly stated he sees his position up top. He will, in Mourinho’s eyes, be considered for a role at No. 9 or No. 10. Dependent on the system that Mourinho settles on this could see him leading the line as a sole striker yet with the arrival of Zlatan this seems unlikely. Therefore, presuming Mourinho lines his team up using a 4-2-3-1 it will see Rooney as part of the creative triple threat behind Ibrahimovic. At the expense of who? New signing Henrikh Mkhitaryian? Anthony Martial?
Can Rooney really stamp his claim on an automatic starting place under Mourinho?
In front of goal Rooney’s clinical finishing has been slowly deserting him. In the 2014-15 season, 33 games saw Rooney score 12, and assist five; 2015-16 saw his goalscoring drop to eight goals in 27 games. A goal every three games from your main striker will not be winning you a title any time soon.
What Mourinho’s comments may have started is a motion of events that will see the phasing out of Rooney as a Manchester United player. And if you cannot be sure of a player’s best position as he moves into his 30s, then this may just be the best decision Mourinho makes as manager.
Whenever Rooney feels he's got 'adversity' he usually came out fighting which was obviously what Sir Alex wanted when he would provoke him a bit. Rooney will no doubt feel the same way now.