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“I appreciate your support! It is abuse and has been for months. Enough is enough.”
With one quote-tweet of a Manchester United fan account at 12.36am on Friday morning, Marcus Rashford finally snapped. The criticism and antagonism became overwhelming. For what feels like the umpteenth time, he’s had enough.
Some may equate taking to X past midnight to complain about abuse you’ve been receiving as part of a pattern of behaviour that includes going to a nightclub after a big defeat or crashing your Rolls Royce.
But as his mother explained to The Times recently, the 26-year-old has lost two people close to him in the past two years and has been through a break-up. This isn’t easy on anyone. You reassess the importance of elements in your life. You make mistakes. You can’t just “focus on football”.
This may well be why Rashford has struggled for form as part of the continually ailing circus United have become. He has scored eight goals and assisted five goals in 40 games this season, often criticised for a perceived lack of effort. He continues to argue vehemently that perception isn’t true. But even if it were, who could really blame him?
Rashford maintains that Manchester United means everything to him, but a football club is an individual, intangible concept, different to anyone who has even a vague relationship with it.
Now, Rashford loves his Manchester United – the theoretical entity which lifted him out of poverty, fed and clothed him from the age of 11; the subject of his childhood dreams which became the utopian reality of his young adult years. He loves a badge and what it represents to him. He loves a stadium and for a long time loved the fans inside it, but that appears to have stopped when they stopped loving him.
Rashford is right to call his treatment by United fans abuse. There’s something of the stereotypical abusive parent there, believing they’re only berating because they really love him, because they know what he can do, because they want him to be special.
In a Players’ Tribune column in February, Rashford wrote about his belief that a “Marcus Rashford” character had been created by the media and fans.
“It can’t just be about me as a 26-year-old lad on a night out, or a lad getting a parking ticket,” he explained. “It’s got to be about how much my car costs, guessing my weekly salary, my jewelry or even my tattoos.
“It’s got to be about my body language, and questioning my morals, and speculating about my family, and my football future. There’s a tone to it that you don’t get with all footballers. Let’s just leave it at that.”
He makes a fair point. As with most footballers, both journalists and fans struggle to fathom a fully-formed human behind the athlete-deity they worship.
It’s much easier to work in binaries, judging good and bad based solely on sporting performance and its surrounding theatre. Here’s two and two, now connect them to make the full 100. Everything else is just unnecessary noise.
Of course, there’s the argument that Rashford should just sit quietly, take it lying down, be a good little club servant. Surely his mouth is stuffed with so much cash he shouldn’t be able to say anything at all? How dare he feed the children when he’s not feeding the fans, the content machine, the inexorable desire for more and more and more?
But really, what is Rashford fighting for at this point? For the abuse? For a sixth-placed finish and more meaningless Europa League games? For teammates who perpetually disappoint him and a manager who’s publicly aired his dirty laundry and made an example of him? For a new ownership who appear content to flog him to PSG, ripping him away from everything he’s ever known?
Only the truth remains: Marcus Rashford is now only playing for Marcus Rashford. And sometimes Marcus Rashford doesn’t feel like he needs to shine. Sometimes he can just go to work, get paid, then go out with his friends. He knows how good he is. He doesn’t have anything to prove to himself.
Here is a multi-millionaire in his 20s who had a tough childhood, never struck out in teenage rebellion, never gets to enjoy being a multi-millionaire in his 20s.
A lot of people seem to believe he sold his soul to the Red Devils, but he didn’t. He signed a £325,000 per week contract to play football, hopefully to the best of his ability on any given day. That may seem obscene to you, but that’s it.
This is another contributing factor here – the standards of Premier League football are now so high, the margins so miniscule, the pressure so suffocating, that any off day is cataclysmic. A bad month is not so much inexcusable as brutally punishable by anonymous social media users questioning your fundamental use as a human. Let’s not get started on an off season.
And so, United fans, it is theoretically your right as a free human to boo Rashford off against Coventry, or abuse him on X, or call for him to be dropped or sacked. But don’t expect that to make him fight more to impress you. He’s not a kicked dog and you can’t expect him to return like one. He owes you nothing.
Rashford is one of the few players with both the platform and the confidence to have explained in no uncertain terms the effect this abuse has on him. Leaving Manchester this summer now seems the obvious next step, his relationship with the club strained to its limits.
United may force out its best player of the past decade because he occasionally struggles for form and suffers from the abuse he then receives. It will not be his fault.
When fans are watching Rashford’s inevitably underwhelming and inferior replacement flounder, maybe only then will they understand what they lost and why they lost it. It may well now be too late to change, so learning is the next best option.
