Wayne Rooney is very bad and very expensive. Manchester United can’t do anything about it.

This year, he’s been poor so much of the time it’s been almost mind-boggling, leaving many to wonder if Rooney has anything left in the tank. He’s only 30, but he’s played more than 650 professional games, and that’s the point at which most top players drop off. Rooney probably just stinks now.

And there’s not really anything Manchester United can do about it.

Rooney is still getting starts based on his reputation, and he’s actively hurting Manchester United most of the time when he plays. It used to be that he would reliably show up for big matches, but that wasn’t really the case this weekend in the Manchester Derby:

That’s a terrible performance in a huge match. It was little wonder that United struggled to look effective in attack against Manchester City, or that the match ended 0-0 with that sort of involvement.

Normally when a team has a player performing that terribly on top of declining for so long, they find a way to get rid of him, but Manchester United can’t do that with Rooney. He’s one of the highest-paid players in the world, making a staggering £15.6 million per year ($23.9 million U.S.) until 2019, or £300,000 per week ($460,410 U.S.). Based on the body of his work during his career, it’s easy to say that Rooney has earned that -- but in the business-oriented world of sports, things are judged on “What have you done for me lately?” and from Manchester United’s perspective, Rooney hasn’t done enough to justify making that much money.

Even with the incredible income that Manchester United can boast, with the Premier League’s massive TV contracts and the club’s marketing and merchandising engines working at incredible levels, that kind of contract serves as a weight holding the team down. Especially in the era of Financial Fair Play, where teams have to keep relatively balanced books or face punishment from UEFA, including the possibility of being banned from the promised land of the Champions League.

Of course, they only have themselves to blame for giving Rooney that contract, so it’s down to United to find a solution -- and that’s a problem that has no easy answer. Do they build a team around him as an advanced playmaker who doesn’t have to run much at all? They’ve tried that, and it didn’t really work as well as they hoped. Do they hand him out on a no-fee loan to any team that takes him? That could help, but only if they can find a team willing to pay all of his wages. Just use him off the bench? Certainly an option, especially given how worn down Rooney’s legs look, but at his wages you certainly want to get more than just super-sub production out of a player.

Perhaps the most audacious solution would just be to stick Rooney in the reserves and hope that he forces his way out via a negotiated release, where United winds up spending significantly less than the approximately £50 million still owed to him on his contract after this season ends. There are significant risks to that, though, not least from the PR backlash from fans angered by the club banishing one of it’s best-ever players like that. There’s also always the risk that Rooney just shrugs and stays where he is, continuing to cost Manchester an exorbitant sum in wages for what would then be no production at all.

But if Rooney has many more matches like he did against Manchester City, that might become a risk worth taking. A Rooney-sized scarecrow would have been more productive than the real thing on Sunday.

No matter what, though, Manchester United are very much backed into a corner when it comes to Wayne Rooney. There’s no good answers for them here -- they can’t keep things as they are, but none of the changes they can make are ideal, either. At this point, it’s a matter of finding the solution that they can live best with, and no one knows what that is.