Everton offered a £50’000 per week contract to Rooney yesterday, his agent Paul Stretford is expected to respond within the next 48 hours. For a club £40m in debt it is a bold move, and some cynics would suggest one that indicates that they are resigned to him leaving and are simply attempting to save face with their supporters.
The Grauniad comments ‘Everton's proposal would amount to a 400% rise, a brave commitment given their financial situation, though the formality of offering a long-term contract is designed as much to provoke a reaction from ProActive, either committing the striker or confirming that he is seeking a transfer.’
Richard Williams, also in the Grauniad, looks at Rooney’s blossoming commercial career.
‘You have to wonder whether it was merely by coincidence that Jose Mourinho expressed his lack of interest in Wayne Rooney's future exactly 24 hours after the teenager had occupied no fewer than 13 pages of last Sunday's News of the World.
‘If they're not stitching you up, of course, they're buying you up, and the story behind the newspaper's "world exclusive" was a fee substantial enough to ensure that Rooney relegated Maria Sharapova - a much better story on Sunday morning, particularly to a paper such as the News of the World - to a single column on page one and a spread on pages six and seven.
‘What may have given pause to anyone thinking of investing the £30m that Everton's chief executive recently named as the minimum figure for Rooney's signature is what this says about the way the player's career is being handled.
‘It would be interesting, for example, to share Sir Alex Ferguson's thoughts. The two players to have grown from adolescence to superstardom at Old Trafford during Ferguson's tenure are Ryan Giggs and Beckham. Initially, Ferguson discouraged the media's approaches to both players. Giggs went along with Ferguson's strategy, and seems to have reaped the benefit in a quiet, well ordered and highly successful private life, to go with his continuing contribution, at the age of 30, on the pitch.
‘Beckham chose the other option. In essence, his decision to build his life around courting publicity represented a willful denial of Ferguson's wisdom and wishes, and eventually the manager was pleased when Real Madrid came along waving a massive cheque.
‘The decision of Rooney's advisers - presumably including his agent, Paul Stretford of ProActive sports management - to give him such exposure at this stage of his career clearly runs counter to the way Ferguson prefers to protect his young players.’