Marcus Rashford’s love affair with Manchester United is coming to a tragic, mysterious finish

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We already know everything there is to know about Marcus Rashford, one of the most famous athletes in Britain, a born-and-bred Manchester United fan who joined the club aged seven, with a social conscience and an eye for goal, a player of undoubted gift who has often struggled to locate it. And yet it can sometimes feel like we don’t really know him at all.

With Rashford, there is always a sense that his world is being stage-managed, that his genuine passion for helping his community is needlessly gift-wrapped in PR speak and photo opportunities, like an ailing prime minister in The Thick of It. Take this latest story, that he is ready to leave Old Trafford for a “new challenge”, a message seemingly choreographed while handing out Christmas presents to children at his old primary school. The journalist trusted to deliver the interview, Henry Winter, wrote the story as a long tweet which began not with the bombshell news that Rashford wanted to leave United – that was left until much later – but that, on handing out gifts, a four-year-old told him: “Thank you for the food as well, Marcus.”

Whether or not you choose to file it under things that didn’t happen, it is hard to escape the feeling that the more we hear from Rashford, the further we get from knowing him, as if he’s caught in a never-ending quest to curate his own authenticity. Does he want to be the humble star who saved children’s school meals, or the world-class striker rattling in goals, or the tearaway who hit a Belfast nightclub hours after a game? He can be all of those at once, of course. But at 27, does Rashford even know the answer?

For the Old Trafford hierarchy, he remains a potentially dicey subject. The club do not want to be seen to be pushing a Wythenshawe-born United fan out the door just for profit, and on Wednesday morning Ruben Amorim was careful not to fan the flames, insisting Rashford could still be part of his plans. “This kind of club needs big talent and he’s a big talent, so he just needs to perform at the highest level,” the manager said. “I just want to help Marcus.”

Yet even United’s most loyal fans seem to have turned on Rashford, a deep love strained to breaking point. He was booed during the Europa League fixture at FC Plzen last week after a display that lacked energy and enthusiasm in sub-zero temperatures. Rashford noticeably ignored Amorim as he stomped to the bench after being substituted.

Another clip that springs to mind is one of Rashford “pressing” against Luton Town last season, in which Ross Barkley dribbles past the United forward without a jot of resistance. It would be harsh to paint a player’s application with one 10-second highlight if there weren’t so many others to choose from. Dry patches in front of goal happen, but the lack of edge on the pitch has become increasingly difficult to excuse. Clearly Amorim felt as much after only a few weeks in the job.

Things could happen quickly now. The transfer window opens in 13 days’ time and although there is unlikely to be a club out there willing to pay a substantial transfer fee on top of Rashford’s 350,000-per-week salary to break a contract with three years still remaining, a loan deal in which the club pay a portion of his wage bill is more feasible. He has had past flirtations with Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, and although they might seem like lofty destinations right now, a move abroad would be more fitting than another Premier League club. It might offer some fresh perspective, too.

After a decade in United’s first team, perhaps the strangest part of Rashford’s career is its wild peaks and troughs. He broke 20 goals in back-to-back seasons across 2019-20 and 2020-21. In the next campaign he scored only five goals, his contract was ticking down and it felt like the end was near. His brother, Dwaine, held well-publicised talks with PSG about a lucrative move away.

Then came the arrival of Erik ten Hag in that summer of 2022, and the unlocking of Rashford’s full potential. He scored 30 goals including a winner in the Manchester derby and the second in United’s Carabao Cup final victory at Wembley, and at the end of the season he was awarded the Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year and Players’ Player of the Year trophies.

His purple patch during that season saw him score 13 goals and make five assists in a 14-match spell from Christmas to mid-February, immediately after the Qatar World Cup (at which Rashford also scored three goals). For a couple of months Rashford morphed from streaky winger into ruthless No 9, plundering goals from around the six-yard box with a mix of arrowed headers, poached tap-ins and clinical finishes after bursting in behind. United lost only once in that period, fuelled by Rashford’s insatiable appetite for more, but it has been missing ever since.

There is an important context to Rashford’s career that is different to most players, having had to grow and learn in a fierce spotlight ever since he burst onto the Old Trafford stage as a teenager. That spotlight has brought with it horrendous personal attacks and racist abuse, and yet he has continued to use his platform for positive causes when he could have shied away.

On the pitch, it hasn’t helped that United have cycled through managers and teammates and different tactical approaches, never settling on a finely honed system like the better teams in the league. One could look at the way Raheem Sterling prospered under Pep Guardiola and consider that Rashford never had that same stability, that same predictability of the ball arriving on a plate at the back post half a dozen times each weekend.

But the drop-off has still been stark. How did Ten Hag uncover the relentless version of Rashford for those few weeks? It was certainly not a softly-softly approach, given the manager’s decision to discipline him for oversleeping and arriving late to a team meeting. Ten Hag dropped Rashford for the next game against Wolves; he responded by coming off the bench to score the winner.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Cristiano Ronaldo’s relationship with both Ten Hag and the hierarchy was imploding at that time. Ronaldo had his contract terminated by the club just before the World Cup, just before Rashford’s scoring streak took off. There was a void at Old Trafford and, for a brief while, a coruscating Rashford filled it.

So there is an irony in how Rashford has come to this point. Ronaldo sought out a secret interview with his favoured mouthpiece, Piers Morgan, without permission from the club, inserted his hand in the puppet and landed a bombshell message to the world. Rashford did it his way, with children’s Christmas presents in hand, and he appeared very conscious of Ronaldo’s messy exit and subsequent criticism of United.

“If I know that a situation is already bad, I’m not going to make it worse,” Rashford told Winter, while potentially making a bad situation worse. “I’ve seen how other players have left in the past and I don’t want to be that person. When I leave I’ll make a statement and it will be from me. When I leave it’s going to be ‘no hard feelings’. You’re not going to have any negative comments from me about Manchester United. That’s me as a person.”

If there is one thing that feels undeniable about Rashford, it is this. For all his ails on and off the pitch, his love for United and his home is deep and true, a love painted in stone on the wall of a coffee shop in Withington with a giant mural of his face. That affection is undeniable, however carefully it is presented. “When something’s inside you, it’s inside you,” he told The Players’ Tribune. “I never put it inside me, it was just there. And then when I went to United it just grew and grew and grew.”

There is nothing wrong, of course, with seeking a new professional challenge, with yearning for change. We have all lost enthusiasm for a job at some point. What is harder to grasp is why he has let his United career slip away so limply, without a fight, when we know there is a ruthless striker inside there somewhere, waiting to burst out, just not wanting to. But then love makes a mockery of reason. After 20 years, perhaps there is just nowhere left to grow.