Let's start with a quiz, shall we? Of the 220 players that started a game in the Premier League this weekend — including Monday night — how many had played more games of competitive professional football than Manchester United's captain and lone striker? And can you name them? Answers after this slightly overwrought video of his debut hat trick.
The evidence Wayne Rooney is physically toast, not just out of form
Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney has made a miserable start to the season. Is he just going through a bad moment, or is all the football he’s played starting to catch up with him?
All done? Sadly, we don't know the answer. It depends which website you ask and which competitions they include. For instance, John Terry has played somewhere between 720 and 756 games for Chelsea, England and Nottingham Forest, depending on whether you ask Transfermarkt, Soccerbase, or — gulp — Wikipedia. Presumably there are good reasons for that, but here's not the place. As such, the answer, and all that follows, will be a little vague when it comes to the numbers. Be warned. No science will follow. Plenty of vagueness will. Sorry about that.
Still, whatever the precise answer is, the general answer is: not very many. Taking Transfermarkt's numbers, it's only three: Terry, Gareth Barry and Petr Cech. Other websites reckon John O'Shea might have also surpassed him. Either way, that's about it.
In that company, Rooney — who has played somewhere between 655 and 665 oh god why isn’t there a generally agreed upon standard and freely available public resource for these things — would complete perhaps the slowest five-a-side team of all time. But there’s an obvious difference between United’s captain and the rest, and that’s age. Terry, Barry and O’Shea all turn 35 this season, while Cech, the youngest of them, will be 34 next May. By contrast Rooney, a mere slip of a thing, won’t even turn 30 until October.
Abstractly, footballers’ careers tend to be divvied up into the following three acts: potential and growth before 23 or 24, a notional peak somewhere between 25 and 29, and then a slow slide down the other side of the hill once 30 shows up. Arsene Wenger, famously, doesn’t tend to give any player over the age of 30 more than one year’s extension to their contract. And so, by that thinking, Rooney should be at the beginning of the end, preparing for the graceful descent into venerability.
But then you look at those other numbers. He’s nearly 30, yet he’s played enough football for a 34-year-old. It’s commonplace to infer from his body shape and the tabloids that Rooney doesn’t take the greatest care of himself, but even if he were an absolute paragon of physical fitness, he’s already played more games than most professionals ever will. Which presents two problems, one for him and one for the club.
His first. In short, he might be a whole lot older than his age suggests (if that makes any sense). We can ignore Cech, since he's a goalkeeper, but O'Shea and Barry have been playing at walking pace for years. Meanwhile Terry, though he was outstanding last season, has been visibly slowing for several years and so far this season has been taken off at half-time against Manchester City, then sent off against West Brom. All three have been able to offset the games in their legs to one degree or another: at Everton, Barry has others to do his running for him; at Sunderland, O'Shea by becoming first a captain, then a substitute; Terry thanks to a deep-sitting defensive line, quality around him, and his own terrifying levels of personal motivation.
By contrast, we saw last season that Rooney hasn’t the wit or the touch to play as a midfielder, and so far this season he’s displayed neither the pace nor the finishing to play as a lone striker. Yes, it’s early days, and yes, we’re guessing: we don’t have access to his medical records, and we wouldn’t know what they meant if we did. But it’s at least fair to wonder if what we’re seeing from United’s captain isn’t just a bad moment of form, but the beginning of the end. And then it’s all too simple to think: well, given those 650-plus games, why would this simply be the beginning of the end? Why not the middle of the end? Or, even, the beginning of the end of the end?
After all, Terry, Barry, O'Shea ... none are long for their respective first teams. Frank Lampard, perhaps the Premier League's most notable physical freak, kept going at his best until around the 900 mark, but his occasional midfield partner Steven Gerrard went from indispensable Liverpool first-teamer to inspirational Liverpool captain around his 700th game. At United, Ryan Giggs kept himself going thanks to a rigorous program of yoga, positional reinvention and (perhaps, occasionally) taking things easy when there wasn't a contract on the line, but he was very much a squad player from 2007/08 onwards — that is, after about 700 games — and he didn't sprint at top speed after about 2001.
All this envelope-back tallying suggests that if Rooney hasn’t hit a wall already, he’s about to. Which leads us which leads us onto the problem for the club. That Rooney needs competition and/or support up front is generally accepted: it’s why Ed Woodward is currently shambling his way around the transfer market like it’s ten to three in the morning and he’s had five too many WKDs, blindly pawing at anybody unfortunate enough to get in his way. But if Rooney actually needs replacing, either immediately or shortly, then not only is that signing even more urgent than previously thought, but there would need to be more to come after that.
Over the last few years there has been much debate about Rooney and his place within the team, driven in part by the sense that he hasn’t quite become the planet-shattering hybrid of Paul Gascoigne and the Minotaur that we were promised, in part by his idiosyncratic relationship with the concept of loyalty, and in part by his occasionally hilarious first touch. But just as time will swallow us all, so the debate about how good he is will soon be overtaken by the debate about how old he is. And that might happen sooner than the tree rings suggest. In theory, United are trying to win the league with one decent striker. In practice, they might be trying to win the league with none.
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