Abhranil Roy
Immediately after Columbia’s exit from the Copa America Centenario last month, the media outlets were rife with rumours that Manchester United were ready to bid 50 million pounds for James Rodriguez, the South American superstar at Real Madrid. As with Gareth Bale, Rodriguez is one of Florentino Perez’s big-name signings. The president will not want the club to part with him, but it makes no sense to keep such a valuable asset if the coach has no intention of using him.
There is always a concern about a player who has fallen out of favour at his current club and Rodriguez endured a miserable campaign at the Bernabeu last season. Rafa Benitez was thought to be concerned about the player’s weight, while Zinedine Zidane is believed to have been appalled at his lack of work rate. As such, the rumours appeared legit for a while, but finally, the great Frenchman came out and cleared the air that James was going to stay at the Spanish capital.
However, United fans should not lose sleep over this, it is actually good that we did not sign him.
There is always a concern about a player who has fallen out of favour at his current club and Rodriguez endured a miserable campaign at the Bernabeu this season. Rafa Benitez was thought to be concerned about the player’s weight, while Zinedine Zidane is believed to have been appalled at his lack of work rate.
The weight issue should be especially concerning to United’s hierarchy. Jose Mourinho demands monumental amounts of effort and commitment from his players. He drags the very last drop out of every single one of them and any who don’t comply are either sold or simply not played.
The former Monaco and Porto star is a luxury player. Yes, he is more energetic and creative than Juan Mata but he is equally limited defensively.
It took Mourinho a whole season to change Oscar’s style to suit his own system and, whilst he was ultimately successful, there are no guarantees the same result will come through working with Rodriguez.
Moreover, the signing of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Mkhitaryan means that we have are already overloaded up front and if he had come as well, it is impossible to see how either Marcus Rashford or Andreas Perreira, two of the academy’s most promising graduates could have got their due chances. As a result, there isn’t actually a guaranteed position for Rodriguez in Mourinho’s expected system, and so we dodged a real bullet there.
