But as things stands, Rashford, the local boy who joined United’s academy at seven, will likely never wear the famous shirt again. Even if Amorim leaves – and despite his candid and charismatic media interactions, the Portuguese is on increasingly thin ice – the bond between player and club is now so frayed that any sort of future rapprochement seems a pipedream.
Instead, Rashford will now try and revive his stalled career with a team, and under a coach, that are clearly going places. Aston Villa were shock qualifiers for the last 16 of the revamped Champions League, and despite recent inconsistency in the Premier League, they remain well placed for a surge towards a top-five finish. With Jhon Duran and his tantrums having departed for Saudi Arabia, Rashford will now be viewed as Unai Emery’s secondary source of goals behind Ollie Watkins.
“I’ve spoken to Marcus a couple of times,” said Wayne Rooney, a goal-scoring prodigy from the United generation that Rashford grew up idolising. “I’ve given him my thoughts. I’ve said: You need to leave the football club.”
How did it come to this? Rashford turned 27 last October. He has 60 caps for England. Logically, he should have been United’s talisman. Nearly a decade after breaking through under Louis van Gaal, and having consolidated his progress under Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solksjaer and Erik ten Hag, Rashford should have been an on-field leader.
Off the field, he had already made a colossal impact with his activism in the community either side of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not without reason that there is a giant mural of him in the streets near Old Trafford. But Rashford the footballer waxed and waned, with a succession of coaches struggling to get him to play at an elite level on a consistent basis.
Just how much of it was down to the overall toxicity at United will become apparent if and when he settles in at Villa. It surely isn’t a coincidence that some of the game’s finest coaches and players have been such terrible flops at United over the past decade. That a fish rots from the head is a fact that few at Old Trafford seem to have grasped. Instead, it’s scaled, gutted and sliced up periodically. But the head remains, dead-eyed and stinking.
Even Amorim, so coveted by clubs across the continent after his work at Sporting in Lisbon, appears to be floundering. The public criticism of Rashford and his attitude was clearly endorsed by those higher up the food chain, but it also succeeded in making him look like a poor leader who throws his players under the bus. For all the hairdryer treatments Sir Alex Ferguson handed out in the sanctity of the dressing room, he rarely, if ever, humiliated a player in public.
Rashford, too, has to take some of the blame. A couple of generations ago, players took big decisions influenced primarily by their families. Now, young footballers have entourages. Several of those individuals are little better than parasites, leeching off the star and the reflected glory. You are the company you keep, and Rashford’s choices in terms of who he has surrounded himself with have sometimes been questionable.
Gary Neville, once part of a golden generation of academy graduates, felt ‘a tinge of sadness’ over Rashford’s exit, but was convinced it was the right step. “In terms of his move, he is going to a team that is far better than Manchester United at this moment in time,” he said on Sky Sports. “They’re in the Champions League, in the FA Cup, they are in with a shout of getting into the Champions League again.”
How does this story end? Will Rashford’s redemption fire Villa towards both Champions League qualification and a place in this year’s competition’s final stages? Or will Emery also conclude that a young man who should be in his prime is now damaged goods? Will United and Amorim salvage their season, or will the local hero’s departure be one more fracture in the relationship with the wider community?
Only one man has the answer. The time for talking is long past. Now, Rashford’s boots must make a statement.
