Binoy Kampmark: The Wayne Rooney Circus

It seemed to be a badly rehearsed act – a querulous player, disgruntled with his management, sapped of inspiration, and wanting to leave in a fit of disgust. But the antics of Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney proved to be nothing of the sort. The brat got his due, and his already extortionate salary has been increased. A five-year contract has been made and relationships are now being patched and papered over. Whether an increased pay packet to a troublesome player will improve the Club’s ambition is another story.

A club such as Manchester City, to which Rooney was supposedly going to defect to, is now so wealthy it must monitor its own expenditures on players in the name of fairness. We were confronted with a bizarre spectacle – Rooney concerned about his own club’s lack of zest and achievement, moving over to one that has not, historically, come close. It all came down to the filthy lucre. The money of City was not just talking – it was roaring.

The ascendant football market is now so hideous it has come to resemble a hungry, Moloch-like creation that needs to be pacified to function. Blackpool’s manager Ian Holloway blames a disease that cropped up after the Bosman ruling of 1995, allowing players over the age of 24 to make a gratis move at the end of their contracts. Sounding almost romantic in his condemnation, Holloway saw Rooney as a creation of the club, effectively its issue. ‘[Manchester United] bought him for massive amounts of money as a young man and they’re helping him blossom into the player that he is’ (Guardian, Oct 21).

The much disliked owners of Manchester United – the Glazers – could well have suffered with the loss of Rooney, though there is evidence that selling him might not have been the worst thing. They have loans and interest to pay, and that staggering debt of £769 million. Sponsorship deals are in the works. A tightrope act is effectively being performed at Old Trafford – to cut costs while securing top results in Europe, which further guarantee high broadcasting revenues at the expense of clubs that do not have such privileged access.

Such an attitude also betrays a fundamental misconception in the way success in football is being examined. City is seen as the more attractive club because of its bankable prospects. The record of Manchester United, though, speaks for itself. Rather than building teams of winners, the Galáctico model of Real Madrid is being replicated across the board on the false assumption that triumphs are directly correlated to the number of expensive players a club has. A successful team and a team stacked with football geniuses have never been one and the same thing, even if they do converge at points. More often than not, the club has acquired less committed footballers so much as mercenaries, and unreliable ones at that.

The words of football players about their clubs have the distinct quality of brief, hollow love. They are unreliable, transitory and entirely fickle. Loyalty is secondary. When love comes at the price of £260 million a week – the price City was willing to offer Rooney – then it has surely become abstract beyond recognition. ‘Whose the whore now Wayne?’ was a banner that made an appearance around certain sections of the United faithful soon after the Rooney revelations. The comment would have cut more deeply, given the recent allegations made about Rooney’s extra-marital transgressions.

Such behaviour has also become harder to police in an age of the celebrity footballer. The management of big clubs are starting to find unruly players more difficult to overcome. Instead, fans, with their vigilante instincts, threaten potential club escape artists with death threats and balaclavas. But in this game, the management have pandered to another instance of the football tantrum. In so doing, Sir Alex Ferguson may well have admitted what Rooney was saying all along – that the team is not quite up to snuff in the highest stakes. Both have diminished themselves in this saga.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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