nick rycroft

Wayne Rooney was on about £90,000 a week when he told Manchester United in October 2010 that he would not sign a new contract, and 2 days later he signed one reported at about £180,000. In between, Sir Alex Ferguson told the cameras the club had "done nothing but help him," and fans outside Old Trafford called it greed. Fifteen years later Rooney says, "I weren't pushing back on money." In the video below, Rio Ferdinand asks him about it. Rooney says the club had offered him a 5-year deal and "a lot of money," and the deal was there. What he wanted to know first was who would replace Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez, both gone in 2009. He asked Ferguson in a meeting, just the two of them, and "he went for me." By his account he had already told the club he wanted to leave, and while he was out injured, Ferguson took it to the media with no warning. On 19 October Ferguson said United were "as bemused as anyone." The next day, a Champions League match day, Rooney put out a statement saying chief executive David Gill had not given him "any of the assurances I was seeking about the future squad." On 22 October he signed for 5 more years, until June 2015. The new deal was reported at about £180,000 a week, double what he had been on. The Manchester United Supporters' Trust said fans were "astonished but delighted," and angry that it "had to be played out in public." Rooney says he regrets the statement. He put it out on a match day, "and I should never have done that," and he went in the next day and apologised. He still says he had "a right to ask a question, given who's gone out the door," because he was committing what he calls the biggest 5 years of his career. I think the timing did as much as the question. His old contract ran to the summer of 2012, so within a year United would have had to sell him cheap or risk losing him, and they had just let Ronaldo and Tevez go. Ask for more while you still have time on your contract and nobody lined up to replace you, because a year later the same question is worth far less. This month he is reported to be heading into the jungle on I'm A Celebrity, and in the clip he says the question he asked in 2010 "still hasn't been addressed." Who had that October right, the fans who called it greed or the player who says he only asked who was coming in? I post one story like this every day: a famous name, the money they made, and who ended up with it.