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Wayne Rooney returns to Everton as a winner but he could've achieved more...

The Wayne Rooney who left Everton for Manchester United — the teenage prodigy with the soft voice and the cruiserweight’s build — has every reason to be proud, 13 years on, of the Wayne Rooney who agreed to make the return journey last week.

He has served as captain of United and England. He has scored more goals for both club and country than anyone else in history. He has appeared more for his nation than any other outfield player. He has won everything he might have aspired to win, with United at least: five Premier League titles, an FA Cup, a Europa League title, a Champions League crown and, in 2008, a World Club Cup.

And yet, Everton’s willingness to commit millions to restoring him to the fold has been characterised, at best, as a decision made with the heart rather than the head. At worst, it is seen as an expensive indulgence, a costly misstep, where Rooney’s presence is to Everton’s detriment and his absence to Manchester United’s considerable benefit. In part, of course, that is soccer, and sports generally: unforgiving, relentless, pathologically averse to sentimentality. The past does not provide credit for the future.

Rooney has faded, of course, and fast; there is a reason José Mourinho spent much of last year slowly easing him out of his team. Time has taken its toll on Rooney more quickly, more cruelly than it has or will on others. His rapid descent was foreseen; he always had the look, the body, of a player who would burn brilliantly but briefly.

His greatness lay in his power, his dynamism, his explosiveness; over these last two, three, four years, all have visibly diminished. Rooney is not today, and will not be tomorrow, what he was yesterday.

There is something else at play too, though, something perhaps unique to Rooney himself: a readiness, if not quite a glee, to write him off at the first available opportunity, to believe that there will be no final hurrah, no last swan song, no Indian summer. It is a trend that has its roots in what he was, who he is and where he came from.

It was at the 2004 European Championships that Rooney announced himself to the world. By that stage, he had already been regarded as English soccer’s ascendant star for almost two years, ever since his last-minute winning goal in a game against Arsenal had moved Arsène Wenger to describe him as the “best player under 20” he had seen in his time in England.

He was still some way from that milestone age when he arrived in Portugal for Euro 2004. He was only 18 as he swept through the early stages of the tournament, prompting Steven Gerrard to describe him as “the best player in Europe” on current form.

His injury, in a quarterfinal defeat against Portugal, was seen as the turning point of that game and, ultimately, England’s campaign, but his overall contribution had already been enough to persuade Sven-Goran Eriksson, England’s manager at the time, to compare Rooney’s effect to that of Pelé, for Brazil, in the 1958 World Cup.

Rooney, from the moment he emerged, almost fully formed, as a 16-year-old, has received as much scrutiny from the front pages of the media as the sports sections, more than any English player since David Beckham. He is as much a celebrity as he is an athlete, exposed to a spotlight possessed of a much harsher glare.

That he is not perceived to have aged as gracefully as Beckham, slowly attaining national treasure status, is worth examining. Beckham’s looks helped him, of course, his style and his cool and his apparent inability to put a foot wrong in the building of his brand.

And at times, Rooney has not helped himself: the tawdry youthful indiscretions, the unseemly contract brinkmanship, the occasional on-field outburst at his own supporters, as at the 2010 World Cup.

But much of the scorn he has attracted — and that has, unfairly, slowly eroded his status — had its roots somewhere else: in his roots. England is a country hidebound by class, trapped in a web of nuance and presumption. Beckham, like Rooney, was born of working-class stock, but his was the right kind: aspirational, smiling, petit bourgeois, of the affluent South East.

Rooney was different. Where Beckham was of the suburbs close to the capital, Rooney came from the housing projects not just in the north, but in Liverpool, a city that takes great pride in standing apart from the rest of the country.

He is bright and pleasant — and, increasingly, searingly frank — in person, but in his early interviews, he was crushingly shy. It created an unfair stereotype to fit an unspoken prejudice: the thick kid from Croxteth, brains in his feet and nowhere else.

Like Beckham, Rooney never delivered glory for his country. Like Beckham, he has been criticised and condemned, fiercely, for long stretches of his career. But unlike Rooney, Beckham was never sneered at for his fame and his fortune. Somehow, he was perceived as deserving his wealth in a way that Rooney was not.
That Rooney endured all of that and still achieved all he has is to his immense credit. He returns to Everton a record-breaker and a history-maker, one of the most decorated players of his generation. If the move is a little nostalgic, perhaps that is no bad thing. Rooney deserves the chance to be missed a little, before he is gone.