IAN LADYMAN: He was a fantastic footballer… but is Wayne Rooney a dud in the dugout?

• Wayne Rooney’s Birmingham have one point in five games since he took charge
• His reign at St Andrew’s could have a seismic impact on his managerial future 
• IAN LADYMAN: It’s nonsense to care where Chris Kavanagh was born – IAKO 

Standing in a car park after an interview at West Brom’s training ground some years ago, a goodbye with Darren Fletcher turned into a chat about the possibilities of football management.

‘I know who will do it,’ said Fletcher, in the last days of his career as a midfielder. ‘Wayne will do it. I am sure of that. He’s a natural fit. We had dinner just the other night. That boy is obsessed with football. It never stops.’

A week or so after that exchange, Fletcher stood on a stage at an awards dinner and once again paid tribute to his friend. 

‘Even from a young age he had incredible football intelligence and awareness,’ said Fletcher. ‘He has an uncommon ability to mingle with players and staff. He is a natural leader.’

Rooney has been a manager for exactly three years now. Birmingham City — where he is five games into a three-and-half-year contract — are his third club, his third spin of the wheel, and it is beginning to feel like a defining period in his career in coaching.

Wayne Rooney has taken one point from his first five matches in charge of Birmingham City

Rooney was a fantastic player for club and country, but is he a dud in the dugout as a manager?

At Derby County and then at D.C. United in America’s MLS, there was always context into which his results could be placed. Derby were in administration as Rooney’s team were relegated from the Championship under the weight of a 21-point deduction in 2022. In America, D.C. United have never been a heavyweight. When they missed out on the play-offs this year, nobody cried.

Equally, it cannot be said that Rooney has proven himself even if his dedication to management has been clear.

There were only 18 days between leaving Derby in the summer of 2022 and moving to America, only four between swapping D.C. United for Birmingham.

A father of four whose family continue to live in Cheshire, the 38-year-old has worked pretty much non-stop for 36 months. He has sat down with Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Gareth Southgate and David Moyes as part of his search for knowledge.

But currently this does not help him. Before his first home game as Birmingham boss, there was a solitary banner welcoming him to St Andrew’s. After the 2-0 defeat by Hull that followed, away fans suggested he would be ‘sacked in the morning’ and some of those in the home end joined in.

In the Midlands, Rooney replaced a popular manager, John Eustace, with the team sixth in the Championship. Rooney’s Birmingham have taken one point from five matches and are now 18th ahead of this weekend’s home game with bottom club Sheffield Wednesday.

After a recent home match, a time-served steward was concerned that supporters might attempt to gatecrash Rooney’s post-match press conference.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have put a couple of heavies on the door.’

Birmingham sacked former head coach John Eustace (above) despite sitting sixth in the league

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By his own admission, Rooney doesn’t know what he’d do without football. ‘If I was sat at home without football in my life it would be horrible,’ he said during his spell in America. ‘I’d miss it incredibly.’

Set in this context, then, Birmingham feels like a job he must get right. He is working for a friend in the Birmingham chief executive Garry Cook. Cook led the chase to sign Rooney from Manchester United when he was CEO at rivals City in 2010 and tried to entice him to Saudi Arabia when in charge of the Gulf state’s Pro League.

Mail Sport’s Football Editor and host of the It’s All Kicking off podcast, Ian Ladyman

Cook — working for Birmingham’s new US-based owners Knighthood Capital Management — says he sacked Eustace because his football ideas didn’t align with his but that doesn’t really ring true. He sacked him because he wanted Rooney through the door.

Rooney brings glamour to a club that has not had any for a long time. But glamour fades quickly against a backdrop of bad results and Rooney is currently trying to turn his team’s form around while seeking to implement a brand of ‘no fear’ football that Cook publicly called for in the week of his appointment.

Rooney would have been wise to dampen all that down when he arrived, to distance himself from Cook’s typically fantastical soundbite. But he didn’t. So the ‘no fear’ characterisation will now follow Rooney around, whether he likes it or not.

‘If you take those words and isolate them you’ll get these questions,’ explained Rooney. ‘In terms of how I want my team to play, I want them to be brave. These are messages I have given to my players at Derby and D.C. United. I want them to take risks.’

Back in America eyebrows have been raised. ‘I would never describe Rooney’s football as aesthetic or pleasing on the eye,’ says Sebastian Salazar, an MLS analyst for ESPN and former D.C. United media staffer. ‘D.C. bought Christian Benteke to play up front so it was pretty clear what they wanted to do.

‘Rooney’s team were not poorly coached. It was direct football that he got them to execute reasonably well. But there was nothing about the style that screamed “high risk”. It was pretty route one and rudimentary.’

Blues CEO Garry Cook insists he sacked Eustace because their football ideas didn’t align 

Rooney’s Birmingham take on Championship cellar dwellers Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday

In Birmingham, a fanbase that has not seen Premier League football for more than a decade is already running low on patience and belief. On a recent episode of the Keep Right On podcast, a discussion concluded that Birmingham fans had never before displayed such hostility to a new manager and a supporter poll revealed that 69 per cent had been against Rooney’s appointment. 

Comparisons have already been made with the decision to replace Gary Rowett with Gianfranco Zola in 2016. That one lasted four months and took Birmingham to within three points of the relegation zone.

Rooney has endured a tough start at the club

If Rooney’s team don’t take points from home matches with Wednesday and Rotherham a week later then they will be similarly placed. Those games are against teams in the Championship relegation zone. Rooney’s opening five have all been against relatively big beasts — Middlesbrough, Hull, Southampton, Ipswich and Sunderland — and one wonders why Cook didn’t wait until the international break and after what was always going to be a tough run of games to appoint his new man.

Rooney has already said the change in style he wishes to implement at Birmingham will be radical. He is sticking to the mantra. Living in a flat near Solihull, he has brought in former club and international team-mates John O’Shea and Ashley Cole to help him as well as long-term ally Pete Shuttleworth with whom he worked — and indeed lived — in Washington and at Derby.

Pivotal to his plans will be increased fitness, Rooney has said. Given that, it was a surprise to some that he gave his players time off over the last fortnight. Rooney sent his players away with individual programmes rather than work them under his own direction at the club’s training ground near the Warwickshire village of Henley-in-Arden. Had he wished to do so, he would have been without Cole and O’Shea who both have international commitments, with England and Ireland respectively.

Rooney’s spell in the MLS was not a disaster but also couldn’t be viewed as a true success story

His D.C. United was not perceived as a particularly progressive or ‘aesthetically pleasing’ team 

As a manager of people, Rooney does at least have credit in the bank. At Derby, as the club toiled under the weight of intolerable financial pressure, their rookie manager established himself as a beacon of calmness and care.

Those who know, played and worked with Rooney often tell of a man of empathy and depth. Much of the coaching work at Derby was done by Liam Rosenior. Now manager at Hull, his testimony is insightful.

‘Wayne is one of the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve ever met,’ Rosenior told the Times. ‘There was a player eating breakfast and Wayne looks across and says, “He’s not eating the same as he normally does. I need to speak to him”.

‘It turned out something really bad happened in his family. People don’t give Wayne credit. He’s so street-smart. Wayne saw that I was outstanding at what I did and allowed me to do that. That is top management. He will prove himself over time.’

Rooney gave 25 academy graduates their debuts at Derby as senior players were sold by the administrators. He also kept in touch with staff who had been made redundant and the parents of young players who had been released.

‘He sort of used all the problems to galvanise us,’ former Derby captain Richard Stearman says. ‘Not just the team but the fans and community. He focused on what we could affect, and that was winning games and playing well. He was very inspiring.’

Hull City boss Liam Rosenior, who worked with Rooney at Derby, described the ex-Manchester United, Everton and England star as one of the ‘most emotionally intelligent people’ he’d met

Rosenoir says Rooney is an empath who is able to identify exactly when a player needs support

Without that mammoth 21-point points deduction, Derby would have finished 17th and safe that season. Nevertheless, his win rate from his time at Derby was a very modest 28 per cent and in Washington it was slightly lower. And this, in truth, is the unanswered question that sits right at the heart of the Rooney resume. It’s about the football.

In America he won 14 of his 53 games in charge in all competitions and D.C. had already decided not to retain him before he left for Birmingham. In America’s Eastern Conference, the top nine of 15 teams qualify for the play-offs. Rooney’s side finished 12th.

‘D.C. are a pretty disorganised club,’ Salazar tells Mail Sport. ‘But they did their best for Rooney. Previous coaches were given rocks and asked to go to nuclear war but Rooney was given carte blanche. This year they were the fifth-highest spending team on salaries in the MLS but in a league where 62 per cent of the teams make the play-offs, D.C. didn’t manage it. You can dress it up whichever way you wish, but it wasn’t a success.

‘There is no anger here. He did his best. He gave it his all. It was not a disaster. But he did fall on his face this season a little bit.

‘When we look back, there was no signature win, or game, or run of results. It was mid-table mediocrity. There is no other way to spin it.’

NFL legend Tom Brady (centre) bought a minority stake in Birmingham City over the summer

On the side of the Royal George pub adjacent to St Andrew’s are two murals. One is of the late, great Trevor Francis and the other is of Tommy Shelby, the fictional lead character of the BBC’s Peaky Blinders drama. Silk next to steel. In a perfect world, Rooney’s Birmingham team would present a bit of both.

The immediate task is daunting, though. Rooney’s Birmingham squad has, like most teams in the Championship, its share of free transfers and loan players. Eustace’s football was pragmatic and some would say that was with good reason.

Asked to assess Rooney’s chances of turning water into wine, one successful Championship manager tells Mail Sport: ‘Why even try? There is a tried and tested way of getting out of the Championship and it’s not by trying to play like Brazil. Some have played their way out. Norwich, Burnley. Most have fought their way out.’

Birmingham are constrained by Financial Fair Play rules like everybody else. As such, there is not going to be an awful lot of money to spend when the January transfer window comes around.

Tom Brady, the NFL star and seven-time Super Bowl winner, is a minority shareholder at Birmingham. There was a lot of fuss made about that earlier this year. But Brady can’t help Rooney now.

Nor, really, can Cook. The chief executive’s vision and enthusiasm has largely been welcomed in the city. Much off the field at Birmingham is better than it has recently been.

Rooney’s reign as Birmingham boss will likely have a crucial impact on his managerial career

But football fans are not stupid. Birmingham fans thought they had something to build on with Eustace and their football club tore it up. Whether Rooney can piece it all back together again will have a telling impact on both his club’s future and his own. Lots of rookie coaches get three shots at it in football. Not many get four.

As for the style of play, in the short term Rooney might take a lesson from these words. His own words. Spoken when looking back at his time at Derby.

‘We played 4-4-1-1 and, when we were defending, 4-4-2,’ Rooney said. ‘It’s what the players had known their whole lives. When you get the ball wide, cross it into the box. Win second balls. Make runs in behind. The midfield two screen the back four. When you lose possession, get into shape, shuffle across, close the space.

‘There’s no point being bottom of the table and trying to bring in some crazy ideas. When you take over in a relegation crisis, I said, philosophies can wait. My philosophy was the next game.’

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