Wayne Rooney and the curse of the Plymouth calendar

After nine matches without a win, the former England international is now Home Parkless,

The secret to great comedy is in the timing. The Plymouth Argyle 2025 calendar had been up for sale for some time, and in many respects it wouldn’t ordinarily have felt that surprising to see the manager’s face representing the first month of the year.

But this apparent lack of foresight on the part of this calendar designers meant that when the manager was sacked on New Year’s Eve it made the January page of this calendar look somewhat redundant, and there was a particularly delicious slice of irony in the fact that the first three days of this years are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, meaning that on the calendar Wayne Rooney–for it is, of course, he–had a big ‘WTF’ next to his head.

Of course, Plymouth Argyle have bigger concerns at the moment than the sudden redundancy of their 2025 club calendar. They’re currently bottom of the Championship, having failed to win any of their last nine games, a run which spreads back all the way to Bonfire Night.

In a tight division they’re still only four points from the dotted relegation line, so this is far from a lost cause, but none of that does Rooney any good; he departs Home Park with another managerial failure to his name and questions again being asked about the suitability of high-profile former players as managers.

What is somewhat troubling about Wayne Rooney’s time in Plymouth has been the rumour mill that has surrounded. This is, of course, the trade-off that you make when you take on a high profile manager. On the one hand, you’ll get a lot of publicity for making this sort of appointment.

But on the other, with that publicity comes scrutiny, and this doesn’t just come from the media. Rooney appears to have been seen out drinking rather more often than feels comfortable, and this obviously leads to questions about his state of mind which it isn’t really anybody on the outside’s place to answer.

And it is worth pointing out that there are some mitigations about his time in Devon to be had, here. The Championship is a deeply uneven division in financial terms, and with no parachute payments from the Premier League, Plymouth are on the wrong side of this. Their wage budget is not one of the highest in the division and the squad is relatively young, having only avoided relegation on the last day of last season by beating Hull City, relegating Birmingham City instead.

The Championship is capable of surprises–consider how Luton Town raced up the division and briefly into the Premier League, for example–but these tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Two of the current top three–Burnley and Sheffield United–were relegated at the end of last year and are therefore in the first year of the financial blanket offered by parachute payments while the other, Leeds United, were relegated two seasons ago.

Plymouth were never going to be likely challengers this season, everyone knows that, and considering their surprise promotion two years ago and their narrow escape last season, their current position in the table doesn’t feel like a huge surprise, even if it isn’t the second season improvement that will have been hoped for.

Of course, none of this really matters in comparison with the desperate fight for survival, but this does raise an intriguing question of its own. It should be very evident by now that hiring a big name manager carries an element of risk to it. There are no guarantees that a great player is going to make a great manager, because the overlap in the skillsets required to do each is so slight.

But if this is the case and a lot of money is at stake in the event that the club is relegated back to League One come the end of this season, why do they take this sort of risk? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to bring in someone with extensive experience of this division, rather than someone with a clearly patchy record–the highlight of Rooney’s managerial career thus far has been the uniquely challenging position of being the Derby manager while their financial basketcasery was at its peak–who hasn’t especially demonstrated much in the way of capability of handling a challenge like Plymouth?

Of course, ambition frequently runs headfirst into reality in professional football. Not everyone can improve, year-on-year. Three out of those 24 in this year’s Championship are going down, whether they like it or not. But everybody has to be seen to be improving their chances, whether they like it or not. And it’s also the case that, no matter how trigger-happy club owners might be, both players and managers will usually be tempted away by the prospect of a ‘bigger’ club and more money. Ultimately, everybody is out for themselves.

Wayne Rooney only ended up at Plymouth in the first place because he was replacing Steven Schumacher, who’d taken them up in the first place, only to be snaffled away by the bright lights of Stoke in December 2023. Schumacher lasted nine months in the Potteries before being deemed surplus to requirements there. It’s not difficult to imagine Plymouth, Stoke, Schumacher and Rooney all being somewhat dissatisfied at the way that 2024 panned out for them in this respect.

Where does Wayne Rooney go from here? Well, the media would be the obvious choice. He’s been a bright and engaging pundit when he has done this in the past, after all, and it’s likely that offers will not take long to start coming in. But will that scratch the itch? Because it’s evident from the fact that he keeps trying that this is something that he desperately wants to be able to do. Through Derby County, DC United, Birmingham City and now Plymouth Argyle, he has repeatedly shown a desire to do this.

The problem is that, other than the very unusual circumstances surrounding Derby County, he hasn’t made a very good job of it. His overall win percentage as a manager is just 25%, spread across four clubs and almost 180 matches. At 39 years of age, he can no longer be considered a rookie. But his relatively tender age—for a manager—does give him time to take the opportunity to learn.

Perhaps what he needs is a spell as just a coach, or as an assistant to a very experienced manager, in order to learn the trade that he seems to want to be successful at so much. And perhaps football clubs should be looking for safer options as their new manager than these celebrity players whose names seem to burn considerably brighter than their managerial credentials and who look like a good idea as the January entry for their calendars. WTF, indeed.

The accompanying image to this piece is licensed from User02039520 on Wiki Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.