Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic: A Season of Striking Contrasts

It's over. Of that, there is surely no doubt. The cheerleading is no longer audible over the sigh of resignation. Both sides of the debate are quietly packing away their banners. A statement from Wayne Rooney released on Thursday evening confirming he will not be leaving Manchester United caused barely a ripple. In a world of yachts, it was a pebble thrown in the ocean.

He's not leaving, yet.

It's now a hat-trick of times Rooney has reaffirmed his commitment to the club in 13 years at United. The first two instances—amid purported interest from Manchester City and Chelsea, respectively—were met with a veritable smorgasbord of emotion. Relief wrestled anger; vexation boxed satisfaction. Not this time.

What will hurt Rooney most is the deafening sound of silence. The noise prior to his bid to quell it was all about China, not the issue over whether United should let him leave. That's now taken as a given.

Paul Stretford may be able to make him the richest footballer in the world by engineering a move to the Far East, but if Rooney harbours any ambition of a Lazarus-like resurrection at Old Trafford, he'd better hope Jesus is a qualified football agent.

To leave before the end of the season always felt counterintuitive given United play Southampton in the Football League Cup final on Sunday—and are still involved in the Europa League and FA Cup. If nothing else, with fixtures stacking up, Rooney should get more playing time than he has been afforded of late. United could have as many as 28 fixtures still left to play.

Though It's fair to say his statement implies this is a situation to be revisited in the summer.

Having started just three of United's last 20 Premier League matches and seemingly fallen behind Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Anthony Martial, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Marcus Rashford, Juan Mata, Jesse Lingard and arguably even Marouane Fellaini in manager Jose Mourinho's thinking, it's all over bar the shouting. Except no one is shouting. The debate doesn't get heated anymore.

If he were any further down the pecking order, he'd be doing the lunchtime sandwich run. It's a good job United are unlikely to have too many inconsequential matches between now and the campaign's close, for it would be hard to watch the club's greatest-ever goalscorer being wheeled out only when it doesn't matter. Bryan Robson endured a similar fate in his final season at United, when he was only furry feet away from being mistaken for the club's mascot.

It's not this writer's view that Rooney is finished, far from it, but in terms of his time left at United, it seems superfluous to even imagine him being anything more than a reoccurring character. The best he can hope for is catching the eye enough to win a spin-off series of his own. Think Dr. Frasier Crane in Cheers. 

Mourinho has said he would never "push" a legend out of the club, according to BBC Sport, perhaps in the same way Janine was adamant she never pushed Barry off that cliff in EastEnders. Given Mourinho is not famed for giving youth its head, the fact he is now claiming Rooney's chances have been reduced because he has to give Rashford playing time every single game, as reported by The Sun, is like being turned down for a date by Warren Beatty on the grounds he's not much of a ladies' man.

Football has always fetishised young players. It did with Rooney in 2002, the year he emerged with chutzpah as big as his shorts. An obsession with youth and who's new must make players at the mid-point in their careers ponder whether they are climbing the mountain or coming down the other side. For those over 30, the time it takes to transition from having a place in the team to one on the bench to one in a rocking chair on a veranda can be cruelly short.

To observe Rooney cracking a joke among fellow substitutes when his eyes betray the smile, it's hard to resist the temptation to push a hand through the television set to offer him a blanket. As Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz once quipped: "Just remember, when you're over the hill, you begin to pick up speed." 

Had Martial or Rashford usurped Rooney as Manchester United's main striker, it would have been a fast-tracked but nonetheless evolutionary process. Showing the soles of your boots to a crowd while lying prone on a canvas is never an enjoyable experience, but it's better to be knocked out by a young pretender than a fellow seasoned pro. 

There's no shame in losing your place to a true great of the modern game. However, Rooney would not be human if he didn't look at Ibrahimovic and feel envious at how football's Benjamin Button has scored more than any player in English football's top flight at 35, while he feels 31 in dog years. Ibrahimovic has had the season Rooney will have daydreamed about having all summer.

In John Updike's Rabbit Redux, the novel's main character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom muses: "What you haven't done by 30 you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more." It seems like a neat way to sum up Ibrahimovic's career.

A lot of footballers become cuter in their 30s, smarter, but very few are better. The current version of Ibrahimovic, however more impressive he is than many of us imagined, is not him at his peak. It's hard, though, to dispute that, accumulatively, he has been more effective since turning 30, which in itself makes him a fascinating outlier. 

In 529 matches before 30, he scored 232 goals. After 30, he has managed 246 in 300. Prior to his landmark year, the best he had ever managed in a single season was 29 for Inter Milan in 2008/09. In the year of his 30th, he marked his final season in Italy by scoring 35 goals in 44 games before moving to PSG. In four seasons in the French capital, he never scored fewer than 30 goals, racking up an eye-watering 156 in 180 matches. Still, the step from Ligue 1 to the Premier League is huge, isn't it?

When Rooney started United's first five matches of the season, he must have thought at worst he would have to share playing time with Ibrahimovic. Some say Mourinho gave his captain just enough rope. With the season now 20 games further on, Rooney has just two Premier League goals in the bank.

Ibrahimovic has 15 goals and four assists in 24 Premier League appearances. In all competitions, he has 24 goals in 37 matches. That's seven more than Martial managed as United's top goalscorer last season. The year before that, Rooney top-scored with 14. Ibrahimovic is United's first reliable goalscorer since Robin van Persie hit 30 in 2012/13.

There's something almost masochistic in Mourinho's seeming obsession not to take him off. He has played every single Premier League minute (2,160) he has been available for over 24 matches, missing only the Arsenal game through suspension. If Ibrahimovic were a horse, the RSPCA would have intervened by now.

In January last year, Jamie Carragher said Rooney had the body of a 35-year-old. In January this year, Rio Ferdinand said Rooney had the body of a 40-year-old. It must have been a hell of a year. If it was Ibrahimovic's 35-year-old body Carragher was referring to, Rooney might still be in Mourinho's team.

Rooney has always been a player who has evoked anger among those who see his overindulgence over the summer months as being nothing less than rank dereliction of professional duties. That image of him in flip-flops and a vest enjoying an oversized red lollipop the size of his head is not easily forgotten. To his detractors, it was a perfect photograph to blow up; English football at its John Bull worst.

Ibrahimovic, in contrast, brought his own personal physio, Dario Fort, with him to Manchester.

If Rooney wears the look of a man who has had a tough paper round, it's because he has. For a player accused of lacking professionalism, he's done pretty well to clock up 745 senior appearances for club and country since his debut as a precociously talented 16-year-old at Everton.

For context, when Paul Scholes retired for a second time at the age of 38, he had played 782 games. At three years younger, Ibrahimovic has managed 830. The points is, at 31, Rooney is already up there with the best in terms of longevity. Amusing as it was, the lollipop snap was little more than a crude caricature.

If it has not been a path well trodden by Rooney already, Sunday's final against Southampton could prove his road-to-Damascus moment. Having not played since February 1 due to a muscular problem, whether he will be involved at Wembley remains in the balance.

Talk of him having played his last game for United with Tuesday's Chinese Super League transfer deadline day looming large was always a little previous, given the vast amount of money involved. However, Sunday unquestionably represents his best chance of playing for United at the national stadium one last time. If he's fit and doesn't make the squad, the Chinese version of Jim White may yet still possibly combust.

The League Cup in recent times has become a competition with a moral conundrum at its heart like no other. With elite clubs in particular almost universally using the format to give playing time to young players and those on the periphery, there is invariably an uneasy dilemma posed when any of them reach the final. A manager has to decide whether to stick with those who got them there, or name his usual first-choice XI.

Sunday will almost certainly see Mourinho at his heartless best. If the Portuguese were in the racing game, he'd have any also-rans rounded up and made into glue at the end of each meeting, so the best Rooney can hope for is a place on the bench.

Ibrahimovic will start, as he always does. While it's possible to appreciate a footballer playing overseas as you might the majesty of an animal via a David Attenborough documentary, it's only when seeing them close up, in the flesh, skin and bone, that it becomes apparent you are witnessing something remarkable.

He arrived in Manchester a huge star but still something of an enigma to English crowds. While impossible to dismiss immaculate goalscoring records in Sweden, Holland, Italy, Spain and France (though plenty did), he made it easy for Anglophiles to pose the proverbial question of whether he could handle it on a cold Tuesday night in Stoke, by virtue of having scored only six goals in 22 appearances against English clubs in the Champions League.

Ibrahimovic's 30-yard bicycle kick for Sweden against England may have been an act of savage ballet Rudolf Nureyev would have been proud of, but having struggled at the European Championship last summer, doubts lingered over whether he was the quintessential flat-track bully. An old one at that.

He's a bully all right but not of the flat-track variety.

Who could have guessed a striker who scored 50 goals for Paris Saint-Germain last season could make his critics "eat their balls," as he eloquently put it, by proving a success in the Premier League? 

"The criticism gives me a lot of energy, trust me. A lot of energy because they get paid to talk s--t and I get paid to play with my feet, that's how I enjoy it," he said at the turn of the year, per the Telegraph's Luke Edwards.

Zlatan was born with a plastic spoon in his mouth, and thank the Lord for it. In a closeted world where Premier League graduates are trained in the art of making a sound without saying anything, to listen to him talk feels like being privy to a private conversation. The idea of him being conceited is nonsense. His tongue is so in cheek it's a wonder it hasn't worn a hole in the side of his face. 

There's no doubt he is now the leader in Manchester United's dressing room. In particular, the younger members of Mourinho's squad look as though they might be considering asking for an autograph whenever they get within a few feet of him. That was once the power Rooney held over team-mates.

Maybe he will again. Just not in Manchester.