A rejuvenated Marcus Rashford has summed up in 15 damning words why he and just about everyone else can’t maintain peak performance levels at Manchester United, and why Sir Jim Ratcliffe is clinging to the increasingly false hope that Ruben Amorim will turn things around at Old Trafford.
Rashford has now contributed eight goals in nine games for club and country, with Barcelona manager Hansi Flick describing him as an “incredible” talent and president Joan Laporta also unable to believe his good fortune. The £26m required to turn a loan move into a permanent one at the end of the season looks like an absurd deal.
But we’ve been here before with Rashford. He was linked with a £100m move abroad after scoring 43 goals and providing 22 assists over two seasons under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. United, who scored 30 goals in all competitions under manager Erik ten Hag in the 2022/2023 season, handed him a highly lucrative five-year deal to fend off similarly keen suitors. But those peaks are followed by troughs.
Rashford scored just five goals in Solskjaer’s third season and eight in ten Hag’s second season. Suggestions of complacency, overconfidence and distraction are all directed at Rashford by people who don’t know or can’t understand why he hasn’t been able to maintain the top level required to be called a world-class footballer. But Rashford himself has fully justified his contradictions.
“I feel like I’ve been in an inconsistent environment for a very long time,” he said.
The 27-year-old was asked by ITV on Tuesday ahead of England’s World Cup game against Latvia what he thought of boss Thomas Tuchel’s claim that Rashford’s lack of consistency is the only thing that makes him a truly elite footballer.
“But I completely agree,” Rashford added. “I think I need to bring consistency to my game and that’s what I’m aiming for. I want to be at my best as often as possible, not just once in a while.
“When people talk about consistency, to be consistent in anything, not just sports, you need consistent variables in your life and the way you train.
“There have been so many changes in my career so far, but I have to move forward and that’s definitely one thing I want to fix and improve to be at my best more often.”
“When I’m at my best, I really enjoy everything about the sport.”
Barcelona’s 10 games is clearly too small a sample size to make big claims about Rashford’s stability, but his comments speak to the predicament Ratcliffe and Ineos are currently in regarding Amorim’s future at the club.
Whether it will be given to him this time, or not as we suspect, Ratcliffe said last week that Amorim needs “three years” at United to prove he is a “great coach”. The vote of confidence for a manager who has overseen the worst season in Premier League history, scoring just 37 points in 34 top-flight games, felt almost like a farce, but the search for consistency goes a long way to explaining it.
Read more: Ruben Amorim given three weeks instead of three years to prove himself against Ratcliffe
Because with just one player, Bruno Fernandes, we can reasonably conclude that being a consistently good footballer for over 10 years is not the norm, not just for a club like Manchester United, but for any football club.
It’s too simplistic to think that managerial cuts and changes are the only culprit – other top clubs with similar approaches haven’t suffered as well – and blindly clinging to the latest new signings just because they happen to be the manager when this dawning realization occurs can have devastating consequences.
But it’s understandable that Ratcliffe is desperate to build a stable team of footballers and avoid the contradictions that Rashford, and no doubt others who have left Manchester United or remain in the midst of madness, see as the cause of their struggle to stay at the top after reaching the top at Old Trafford.
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