In 15 damning words, a rejuvenated Marcus Rashford summed up the reason for his and almost all others’ inability to maintain peak performance levels at Manchester United, and why Sir Jim Ratcliffe is clinging to the increasingly false hope of Ruben Amorim turning things around at Old Trafford.
Rashford now has eight goal contributions in nine games for club and country, Barcelona boss Hansi Flick has described him as an “unbelievable” talent and president Joan Laporta can’t believe his luck. The £26m required to make his loan move permanent at the end of the season looks like an absurd bargain.
But we’ve been here before with Rashford. After 43 goals and 22 assists across two seasons under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer he was being linked with £100m moves abroad. 30 goals in all competitions under Erik ten Hag in 2022/2023 saw United hand him a very lucrative five-year contract to ward away the same eager suitors. But troughs have followed those peaks.
Rashford scored just five goals in Solskjaer’s third season and eight in Ten Hag’s second. Suggestions of complacency, overconfidence and distraction have all been aimed at Rashford by people who don’t and can’t know why he’s never been able to sustain the top level required to be labelled a world class footballer. But Rashford himself has perfectly sound justification for his own inconsistency.
“I feel like I have been in an inconsistent environment for a very long time,” he said.
The 27-year-old had been asked by ITV ahead of England’s World Cup qualifier against Latvia on Tuesday what he thought about Thomas Tuchel’s claim that the only thing preventing Rashford from being considered a truly elite footballer was his lack of consistency.
“But I completely agree,” Rashford added. “I think consistency is what I need to bring into my game and I am looking to do that. I want to be at my best, not sometimes, but as often as possible.
“When people talk about consistency, in order to be consistent in anything not just sport, you need consistent variables in your life and the way you train.
“We have just had so many changes so far in my career but I have to look forward and that it definitely one of the things I want to put right and improve on to be at my best more often.
“When I am at my best I really enjoy everything about the sport.”
Ten games for Barcelona is evidently too small a sample size to make any grand claims over Rashford’s consistency, but his comments do speak to the predicament Ratcliffe and Ineos now find themselves in with regards to Amorim’s future at the club.
Whether he will be given this time or – as we suspect – not, Ratcliffe said last week that Amorim needs “three years” at United to prove he’s a “great coach”. And while that felt like an almost farcical vote of confidence in a manager who’s overseen their worst Premier League season ever and has accrued just 37 points in 34 top flight games, the quest for consistency goes a long way to explaining it.
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Because having just one player – Bruno Fernandes – you could reasonably pick out as being a consistently good footballer in over a decade isn’t normal, not just for a club like Manchester United, but any football club.
It’s far too simplistic to suggest that the chopping and changing of managers is solely to blame – other top clubs with a similar approach don’t suffer in the same way – and blindly sticking with the latest recruit just because they happen to be in charge when this dawning realisation occurs could be catastrophic.
But it makes sense that Ratcliffe, in a bid to build a team of consistent footballers, is desperate to avoid the inconsistencies that Rashford, and doubtless others who have either left Manchester United or remain in the midst of the madness, see as the cause of their struggle to remain at the pinnacle once it’s been reached at Old Trafford.
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