Marcus Rashford and Man Utd are locked together – there will be no takers on his current wages
Marcus Rashford’s Man Utd career is at a crossroads Credit: Reuters/Molly Darlington`
The Marcus Rashford problem for Manchester United is quite simple – on the terms that they negotiated his current contract at the end of what was his most successful season as a senior player by some distance, 2022-2023, there are no takers.
Then in July last year, Rashford, with 30 goals in all competitions, including 17 in the Premier League, equalling his best-ever league total, was the player whom United could not lose. Having appeared to have developed a rapport with United’s new manager, Erik ten Hag, and embarked on a dazzling goalscoring run that lasted from Christmas 2022 almost to the end of the following February – all seemed well.
He became the highest earner at United, on a reported £325,000 a week, and then went into a tailspin that threatened to take his career down with it. He had scored just three United goals by the turn of the year last season. As for his relationship with Ten Hag, that would appear to have been in the proverbial bin by the time the Dutchman departed.
Within a year of agreeing that deal, United were, as Telegraph Sport revealed, seeking offers for Rashford who would have been out of contract in the summer of this year under the terms of his previous deal. The pre-Ineos regime that negotiated that Rashford deal would argue they were damned either way. Losing an asset such as Rashford for nothing would have cost the club millions. Keeping him was always going to cost millions more. For Ruben Amorim, there is no alternative but to try to rescue the player’s form and purpose.
Marcus Rashford and Man Utd are locked together – there will be no takers on his current wages
Can Marcus Rashford rediscover his best form under Ruben Amorim?
With a deal until 2028, which will take Rashford to within four months of his 31st birthday, United’s new manager cannot afford to have the club’s best paid player on the outside. That is poison for any club as others have found to their cost – Arsenal with Mesut Özil, United with Cristiano Ronaldo. It upsets the natural order of things, emboldens others to pitch for bigger deals, and in the inevitable severance pay-off ultimately adds a cost that can be crippling for compliance under financial controls.
Three goals for Rashford under Amorim so far has represented a reasonable start although Rashford has not started either of the two recent defeats by Arsenal and Nottingham Forest. The aftershock of last season, his non-curricular activities in Belfast and his eventual non-selection for Euro 2024, continue to rumble. A complicated and delicate character, Rashford’s revival is not a simple task for Amorim. Come February it will be nine years since his debut and United and Rashford have never managed to get it right together.
Rashford is going nowhere for now
Rashford will argue that, had he been born a decade earlier, he would have been a United player in an era of much greater stability and success for the club. He does, after all, have a good record of staying injury-free. United, however, gave him the biggest contract they have ever bestowed upon an academy graduate and, while Rashford cannot control football’s ever spiralling wage budgets, that also counts for something.
At the time, the July 2023 contract worked well for both sides. United secured the prime years, as they saw it, of their best goalscorer. Rashford, for his part, became an extremely wealthy man, as opposed to just a very wealthy one. Now, United, struggling under consecutive annual losses and the tight margins of profit and sustainability [PSR] compliancy, would like a little scope to sign players for their new manager. A Rashford sale would give them PSR breathing space.
But it is clear that Rashford is going nowhere for now. The era of high-fee transfers for players of his age, and with his contract expectations, might have passed already as PSR and squad costs bite across the Premier League and Europe. In all but England, broadcast revenues are falling.
Which means the two parties are locked together and both will have to make it work. The year 2028 is distant indeed and, as Amorim will note, he will have to stay in the job longer than every one of his predecessors post Sir Alex Ferguson, if he is still to be at Old Trafford when Rashford’s deal does at last expire.