Rooney: United should not have dumped Louis

WAYNE ROONEY believes Manchester United made a huge mistake sacking Louis van Gaal.

The former United striker has hailed the Dutchman as the best manager he’s ever worked with in a new book about Van Gaal’s storied coaching career.

Rooney claims the decision to axe Van Gaal less than 24 hours after winning the FA Cup in May 2016 was a massive blunder.

Rooney said: “I was devastated when Louis was sacked. For me, it was an absolute joy to work with him.

“We should have kept him for a third season. We would have been so much stronger.

“I felt things were improving and players started to understand his vision.

“In those two years I learnt more than under any other manager.

“This is why I will be forever grateful to him. Not just for making me captain, but also for all the trust and belief he had in me.

“We didn’t have the best team in the league anyway, but we could not afford to have 12 players injured.

“Our first 11 was good enough to play in the top four, but once we got injuries we got in trouble because we did not have the same quality in the squad as in the years before.

“That process at the time was good for me because I had decided that I wanted to be a manager.”

Both Rooney and Van Gaal have given candid accounts of the time they spent together at Old Trafford in the book ‘LVG – The Manager and the Total Person’, which has just been published in Holland.

Rooney, 34, is now player-coach of Derby as he builds towards his ambition to follow Van Gaal into management.

Van Gaal reveals how he made the England striker his captain when he arrived in Manchester in 2014 in a bid to improve Rooney’s wild behaviour off the pitch.

Van Gaal now admits the ploy didn’t work – although he did laugh when a video was posted on social media of his skipper being knocked out in a drunken sparring session with former team-mate Phil Bardsley.

Van Gaal said: “I could not fault Rooney’s professional attitude on the field for one second.

“But the way he lived his life off it, was a different story. So I made Wayne captain to try and get more control of him. Unfortunately, we did not quite succeed.”

I was devastated when Louis was sacked. It was an absolute joy to work with him