Throughout Manchester United’s long history, we have had a number of great personalities, delivering performances enough to secure goals, points, trophies, memories and history to the club.

Several players have given their all simply to see United succeed, The Munich survivors and victims’ in particular. They have lived by the slogan ‘United above everything’ and given millions of reds reasons to be proud of our club and wear the red shirt with passionate pride.

Despite no-one has given so much for our club that the Munich victims did (and no-one obviously don’t demands that either), most players have accepted that they’re worth less than the entire club, but they can play a part as long as they’re giving their all on the pitch and represents Manchester United in a way Manchester United are benefitting from.

Mainly this means to do what the gaffer tells you to do and behave in a way the gaffer can deal with and accept. And especially Sir Alex Ferguson has been watchful here: Those who put themselves over the club better look for the exit door, no matter how good they are or what they have achieved.

Paul Ince was shown no mercy by Fergie when he became a big-time Charlie and wanted other Old Trafford personnel to call him ‘the Guvnor. David Beckham, needed to book his flight for Madrid when he became more of a superstar than a footballer in 2003. Three years later Ruud van Nistelrooy who managed an incredible tally of 150 goals for United, followed Becks to Real Madrid when he had a dispute with the manager.

Even one of the club’s greatest captains, Roy Keane, had to look for another employer after public ly criticising several of his teammates at United’s own TV channel MUTV, which as you can imagine did not go down too well with Sir Alex.

These set of consequences of ‘cross the boss and you’re out the door’ lasted until last Autumn when of course as we all know Wayne Rooney announced that he wanted to move on as a result of his ambitions not being matched by the club.  It did seem at the time a strange decision. Why would the club’s star player suddenly want to leave after six years despite winning countless amounts of silverware?

Immediately in October in the wake of Rooney’s announcement, speculations and rumour arose about where he was heading next, it was understandable that most football fans at the time questioned Rooney in terms of his loyalty, credibility and team spirit and doubted whether or not his heart had ever been committed to the cause in the first place.

However in a shocking twist, two days later it was announced that Rooney had put pen to paper on a new deal keeping him at the club until at least 2015. Like water or ice spray can turn an injured footballer on the floor into a fit one standing upright, a weekly wage estimated to be around £200.000 and a chat from the manager seemed to have changed his mind.

Despite apologising to the fans and players about wanting to leave, Rooney’s troubles did not end there as after a summer tainted by England’s World Cup problems, he now had to focus on playing again – which after all is what he’s paid to do.

It took him a good 3-4 months to get back to the kind of form that United fans would expect him to be at and whilst he worked hard and performed well in the run-in, it’s worth remembering that other players had kept the red flag flying by doing the exact same as well without questioning the club’s lack of ambitions or rating their teammates as not good enough. 

Despite all of Rooney’s issues last season, his name was the most popular on the back of Premier League shirts brought last season. Incredibly there were more United shirts sold last year with ‘Rooney 10’ on the back than Chelsea and Liverpool shirts sold printed with Torres on the back.

There’s no doubt that Rooney is a fantastic player, we all know that. However, I have some questions for all of those fans who did buy a United shirt that had ‘Rooney 10’ on the back.:

Why after the saga last season would you want one?

Why would you want the name of a player who has now given players better cards on their hand in contract negotiations in the future, allowing them to demand even more money, which they actually do not need at all?

The most important question though is why wouldn’t you want to have a shirt printed with the name of a player who has actually acted professionally throughout his career at the club, whose respect to the cause has never been questioned once and who hasn’t needed to apologise after almost leaving the club? It’s certainly something worth thinking about when you see fans buying shirts.

By Nicolas Berg @Nicopoleides