Rooney documentary review: A regretful portrait of a flawed genius

“He’s the biggest English talent I’ve seen here, since I’ve been in England,” says the former manager Arsene Wenger in this new documentary, in footage taken from a post-match interview, shortly after his Arsenal side had been sunk by a wonder-goal from the 16-year-old Wayne Rooney. “I hope he will not be injured now, in the next two or three years, and that mentally he’ll be able to cope with what’s happening to him. He’s a huge talent.”

Looking back with the help of this documentary, released almost two decades on from that breakthrough goal, it seems fair to say Wenger, in his typically astute way, mapped out the future of this prodigious teenager. Rooney was undoubtedly the most gifted English footballer of his generation, but also someone hampered by injuries at the cruellest of times, and who seemed able cope with pressure of fame and expectation as much as he fell victim to it.

It might seem strange, on the face of it, that a documentary featuring a footballer achieving all sorts of greatness — multiple Premier League titles, a Champions League win, record goal-scoring tallies for both England and Manchester United — is a predominantly painful watch, but then Rooney’s career was a thing of paradoxes; a man whose light was never too far from its shadow.

The film is rooted in the present day, with Rooney beginning the documentary as player-manager at Derby County, and ending with his retirement from playing in January 2021. But with the help of archive footage, talking-head interviews from other ex-pros and former managers — the likes of Thierry Henry, David Beckham, David Moyes and Sven-Göran Eriksson — as well as straight-talking, largely solemn and often confessional interviews with Rooney himself, we’re taken on a journey through his life so far, highlights and lowlights aplenty.

There are a few prevailing messages. One is that Rooney, born and raised in the Liverpool suburb of Croxteth, was “brought up to fight”, and though he admits to sometimes taking that “too literally” — he remembers the perverse thrill of getting into scraps as a teenager — it was that same mentality that made him such an unstoppable force on the pitch.

Another lasting impression is of a boy forced into manhood before his time. Even as a prolific youth player, he was being touted as England’s great new hope, and by the time he was heralded as the final piece to slot into the jigsaw of his country’s “golden generation”, at the European Championship in 2004, he was still only a teenager. He certainly had the belief — “I remember at the tournament, at 18, thinking to myself, ‘I’m the best player in the world, there’s no one better than me’” he says at one point — but his awareness was a double-edged sword. “I felt like if we were gonna win the tournament, it’s because of me,” he remembers, but adds: “If we don’t win it, it’s because of me.”

The scrutiny on such a pivotal player was exacting, and often brutish. As a number of interviewees point out, Rooney’s stature and skill on the pitch made it easy to forget how much of a child he still was. In one piece of footage, we see him mumbling along at his first ever Everton press conference, aged 17, only giving short answers. He was understandably nervous, but it led to a particularly pernicious — and probably also classist — rumour that he was unable to read or write. This was around the same time he bought his first house, alongside his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Coleen; a move to only intensified the spotlight on them. “We always grew up quicker than what we were meant to,” she remembers.

The film charts both the times when Rooney was able to shake it all loose and perform to a world-class standard — his phenomenal early performances at those 2004 Euros, or his debut for Manchester United, where he scored a hat-trick — and those when it all got too much. He admits to wearing extra long studs in a game against Chelsea because he wanted to go out and “hurt someone”, and puts his infamous red card against Portugal in the 2006 World Cup down to a loss of control: “My head had completely blurred out.”

And then, there are the off-field controversies that led to tabloid feeding frenzies, not all of which are included here. The film makes note of Rooney’s visit to a “brothel” in 2004, and later of his involvement with an escort. We’re spared the finer details, and the situations are calmly, if still painfully, remembered by Coleen, who says she has forgiven her husband, even if she maintains his actions were “not acceptable”. There are more than a few nods to how Wayne’s relationship with alcohol played a part, and is still a cause for concern now: “It’s not a good thing for Wayne to be unsupervised,” Coleen says.

Some scenes do plod — shots of Wayne enthusiastically beating his sons at Snakes and Ladders is a perfectly decent example of his need to win, but could do with some editing down — and overall, it’s hard not to leave the film feeling regretful. How different would Rooney’s career have been had he not been hounded by the media, not made those mistakes in his personal life, not got injured at the 2004 Euros or, as we learn here, not kept secret an injury at the 2006 World Cup because he was so desperate to play — or even if he’d emerged later, under the fatherly guidance of Gareth Southgate as England manager, rather than the knives-out atmosphere of the failed golden generation? We’ll never know. Rooney was a great, and the film proves that, but you can’t help wondering how much greater he could have been.

February 11, Prime Video