"He's the one player who can go and get my goalscoring record." That's Wayne Rooney, on Marcus Rashford — and coming from the man who scored 253 goals in a United shirt, that's not a throwaway compliment.
Rashford is back at Old Trafford after loan spells at Aston Villa and Barcelona. He hasn't featured for United since December 2024, when Ruben Amorim effectively froze him out. Amorim is gone now, replaced by Michael Carrick, who has been clear he wants Rashford involved. "He gives us something a little bit different. And he's been in great spirits since he's been back," said Carrick.
Whether that translates into goals and minutes is the real question.
The gap is smaller than it looks — but the attitude problem is real
Rashford sits on 138 United goals, good for 15th on the all-time list. Rooney's record of 253 is 115 away. At 28, with potentially six or seven more years at the top level, that's achievable — if everything else falls into place.
And that's a significant if. Rooney wasn't just handing out praise on his podcast Stick to United. He was diagnosing a problem. "Marcus' body language isn't great, and so it might be something he has to work on." He also flagged work rate as an issue, drawing on his own 2010 experience when he pushed to leave the club: the path back runs through the fans, and that path is built on visible effort, not talent alone.
Body language and work rate aren't things you fix overnight. They're culture questions — and United's dressing room has had enough of those over the past few seasons.
Barcelona passed, now Rashford has no escape route
Reports suggested Rashford wanted to make his Barcelona loan permanent. The Spanish club declined. So here he is, back in Manchester, with a new manager willing to give him a fresh start and a club legend publicly backing him to become its greatest-ever scorer.
That's a better position than it sounds. United's attacking options have been threadbare, and a fully motivated Rashford — the one who was electric between 2022 and 2023 — would change their goals market outlook significantly. The problem is United fans have been waiting for that version to return for two years now.
Rooney put it plainly: "He has to just get his head down, work his socks off, and then be more positive." Simple words. Not so simple to execute when your relationship with a fanbase has cooled the way Rashford's has.
