Rooney’s world of woes
The American adventure began at the end of June 2018. He left Everton, the club he has supported since he was a boy, and signed as the star striker of struggling Washington-based soccer team DC United.
One rather sniffy headline ran: “Rooney taking a pay cut to play for one of the worst sides in the US”.
But the rewards are good: it is thought he is being paid a staggering £300 000 (R5.4 million) a week over the three and a half years of his contract.
Rooney is renting a house in the suburban Bradley Hills Grove neighbourhood of Maryland – a 50-minute drive from Washington, DC – with wife Coleen and their four sons, Kai, 9, Klay, 5, Kit, 2, and baby Cass. The brand new pillared pile is a whopper – 3 658m2, with seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and parking for four cars – and costs £12 600 a month.
But while their domestic set-up is suitably luxurious, their social life and status are not what they used to be. A source said: “Wayne and Coleen are really bored over there. She has no friends and is at home with their kids all the time. They are in Maryland, which is really quiet, so if they do go out, it’s bowling or cinema with the kids.”
Gone, too, is Rooney’s famous profile. In America, he is barely known. He flies economy with the rest of the team when they play away games and has to share his modest hotel room with another member of the squad – an almost unthinkable circumstance.
He told an interviewer: “I share with our centre-half, Steve Birnbaum. If we’re watching something, he leaves his laptop on when he goes to sleep, which is a bit annoying.”
He said it was a novel experience to be treated like any other member of the public. “Here, you can go out. People still recognise you but approach you in a different way.
“I’ve always felt in the US they celebrate success a bit more than England. That’s not having a go at people back home. It’s just a different mindset.”
Curiously, Rooney has only been seen twice in local bars over the past seven months. Although he has a driver – he would have to retake his test to drive in the US – getting out for a night on the town seems to be the rarest occurrence.
In fact, parted from his friends, and far away from the “booze-birds-and-Bentleys” British football culture, his social life seems to have dwindled to nothing.
Every now and then he has gone out with team-mates – dining on lobster rolls at The Salt Line restaurant in Washington over the summer – but it seems that none of the Washington players are up for “big nights” involving buckets of alcohol and nightclubbing.
At home, his partners in crime were former Manchester United team-mates Wes Brown and Phil Bardsley, but he has not found anyone cut from a similar cloth. Instead, he is glued to the Premier League every Saturday – guaranteed to make him miss his glory days – before playing in his own matches, which are at an evidently lesser level. His chief hobby is playing FIFA on his PlayStation. Rooney grumbles that the time difference means his pals are online just at the time when he’s wanted to help with the children.
Perhaps he boozed it up on the private jet in December as a reaction to the dull regularity of his new life, where he is deprived of the superficial glitter he has been used to since he was a teenager.
Off the pitch, Rooney is in the habit of going from scandal to crisis, and although both he and Coleen have tried hard to present their American adventure as a shiny, fresh start, a fall from grace seemed inevitable.
Last September, a couple of months after settling in Washington with her husband of 10 years, Coleen popped out for a tarot and crystal reading with a psychic known as Mrs Jessica to find out what her future might hold. From her rooms above a milkshake parlour in Georgetown, Washington, DC, Mrs Jessica delivered a prediction of “troubles in the marriage” yet to come.
It wasn’t what Coleen, homesick and desperately missing her parents, wanted to hear. But anyone who has followed Rooney’s fortunes – the prostitutes, the party girls, the boozing and the gambling – would have thought her forecast a decent guess. And within months Rooney, 33, was in hot water. Exiting a private jet flight from Saudi Arabia after a business trip without his wife on December 16, he was apparently so hopelessly plastered that he triggered a door alarm while going through Washington Dulles airport.
He was arrested for public intoxication, held at a detention centre, and released after paying a fine.
Coleen – yet again – was furious and reportedly yelled at him: “How many times do you need to be told?” She then said he wasn’t to go out of the house again without her supervision. You can see why she would be so annoyed as the latest disgrace follows hard on the heels of his arrest for drink-driving.
He was stopped nearly three times over the limit in September 2017, driving the car of a girl he had picked up in a bar in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.
But Coleen’s curfew has clearly been lifted, as this week Rooney was spotted wandering around the Bethesda suburb of Washington on his own, muttering to following photographers that he was “doing fine”.
The family presented a united front this week, going out shopping at their local mall. The bottom line is that Coleen has forgiven him. Again.
Indeed, Coleen, 32, seems to regard her husband as a fifth child.
Within a week of landing in the States in early August, Coleen was pictured hitting the shops wearing a casual pair of denim cut-offs and baby pink Gucci loafers. The family enjoyed a shopping spree at Washington’s premium outlet store Saks.
Since then the family has become regular sights at their neighbourhood Starbucks. Rooney often drops in for a coffee after doing the school run. They are also sometimes seen at the nearbyBurger King for an after-school treat. Coleen goes for blow dries locally, and to the gym, carrying a £2 700 Chanel Deauville tote.
She seems to be a fan of green juice from one of the city’s many health food cafés, too. Not that she’s shunned the family’s beloved fast food completely – she was recently seen picking up Nando’s and McDonald’s takeaways.
The Rooneys’ three school-age boys have been enrolled at a private establishment in Washington. Fees start at $13 000 annually (R180 000) for the nursery, and go up to $34 000. “The school they are in is good. They are enjoying it. It is a British school,” Rooney has said.
He is also finding he sees more of them. “I picked my kids up from school yesterday and took them to the shopping mall, and there was no bother.
“I’d promised Kai a computer to play Fortnite on. Then we went bowling and to the cinema.
“In England, I had to plan and make sure everything was right before we went. I can spend more time with my children, rather than looking over my shoulder. I can be more relaxed.”
The family has also visited the Six Flags adventure park just outside Washington for Halloween and celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday in Disneyland, California. In December, the Rooneys were guests of honour at the White House Christmas Party and were given a guided tour of the building. President Donald Trump’s 12-year-old son Barron plays for DC United’s youth team and is a huge football fan.
Rooney has also taken the boys to an ice hockey match and has joined a fantasy NFL league. He’s also learning about baseball in an effort to fit in and have something in common with teammates.
Up to a point, then, their lives have an American flavour.
Coleen said: “My youngest one is going to be learning to talk in America. They’ll all have a bit of everything accent-wise
Shrek-like when they come back. I don’t think it will affect us as a family–— as long as we are all together, we can take on anything.
“When Wayne signed, there was no doubt in my mind that we wouldn’t go. We are a family.”
Coleen’s parents Tony and Colette went to the US to spend August with the family. Her brothers have also visited.
Tony took Rooney, who like Coleen is religious, to the Washington National Cathedral. Coleen was apparently very homesick when they went back.
“She’s hoping things will get better,” said a source.
Coleen said in August: “It’s hard not being able to pop down the road – an eighthour flight is a long distance. You can’t just nip over for a cup of tea.”
As soon as Rooney’s playing season finished, the family came back to the UK for a Christmas break.
Coleen seems to have been particularly overjoyed to return. Building works on their mansion in Cheshire have finally been completed, meaning the family were able to spend the festive season at home.
They spent New Year at the ultra-plush Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds before returning to Washington.
Rooney is due back in training in the last week of this month ahead of the season starting in March.
Sources say Coleen is rather gritting her teeth and making the best of the move and found it ‘a wrench’ to leave her home in England behind again.
Although Rooney has signed a three and a half year contract with DC United, he and Coleen have agreed she will spend only two years with him in Washington. By September 2020, she will be back in their Cheshire mansion with the boys.
Kai will be starting senior school, and they have agreed that it is a priority to have him start at his favoured establishment in the UK.
Rooney will, then, have to be trusted on his own for 18 months.
With a history which includes gambling away a reported £500 000 and getting too drunk to remember his address, one has to wonder if that will be a good idea. | Daily Mail