A leading physiotherapist explains how the Manchester United and England captain will have to deal with his changing body as he enters a key phase of his career
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Happy 30th Birthday, Wayne Rooney! The good news today is that you are England’s greatest goalscorer of all time and are destined to achieve the same feat with Manchester United. Your name will go down in your country’s footballing folklore thanks to your achievements in both the national shirt and that of the nation’s most iconic club.
Yet there is bad news too for Rooney. Like many footballers, the onset of his thirties raises questions about his ability to prolong his career. It takes a huge amount of hard work and good fortune for anyone to extend their playing days right up to the age of 40 these days, and as such questions will understandably start to be asked about how much longer the former child star can go on for.
Rooney’s former United team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo recently claimed he wants to keep playing until he is 40, but such a target seems altogether less likely for the England captain. As leading chartered physiotherapist Mark Buckingham told Goal, the same power and pace which make him a superstar at 16 will also potentially spell an earlier end to his career.
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He was already a man when he was about 16 or 17 and was very well built, whereas Ronaldo was a skinny kid who took a while to break into himself,” says Buckingham. “Ronaldo spent a lot of time in the gym at United and really developed into himself there, whereas Rooney was the other way around. He was so physically developed and strong and solid, and he has had to work hard through the years to keep the weight down and to keep himself in shape.
“There are three different body types, the ectomorphs, the endomorphs and the mesomorphs. Most of the mesomorphs are the mediums, you have the ectomorphs which are your Ronaldos, and then you have you chubby ones like Rooney which are endomorphs.
“We’re all a blend of all of those, but you have your perfect physical specimen such as Ronaldo, who would still be able to eat what he wants – within reason, obviously – and he could just look at a treadmill and the pounds would fall off him. Rooney would be the other way around in that he’d only have to look at a plate of chips and he’d put on a stone. So he would have to really work hard at his diet and his training.”
Beyond Rooney’s physical shape, there are biological reasons why entering your thirties sees a natural slow down, as Buckingham explains.
“What happens when you come into your thirties is that your naturally-produced growth hormone, which keeps your physique at a certain level, starts to diminish and that’s how you get the start of the middle-age spread. Therefore you have to work harder to keep everything in the right places.
“Rooney looks like he’s a solid frame, so he will probably be super fit. He still careers up and down the pitch and, while I don’t know what his stats are, I bet he’d still be covering the ground as he always was. The one thing that he’d have lost is that little bit of pace, which he won’t get back now. So as he gets older now, he’ll have to work extra, extra hard at keeping at the levels he’s reached with his hard work today.
“The difference between him and somebody like Ronaldo is that Ronaldo will still be benefitting from his body type and therefore he won’t have to work quite as hard as Rooney will to maintain his levels.”
But Buckingham, who has worked with British Athletics for 16 years and was a key component in the later career of distance runner Paula Radcliffe, adds that Rooney has one major factor working in his favour when it comes to the general change in footballers’ lifestyles over the past 20-25 years.
“Becoming 30 now doesn’t have the impact that it did on the last generation of players, mainly because they look after themselves. For instance, when Sir Alex Ferguson took over at Manchester United there was a massive drinking culture and everyone would go down the pub at lunchtime, which goes a long way to adding to your wear and tear.
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“That culture having changed within football will really help Rooney’s longevity in his career. So maybe the 30 now is really 35. Basically, if Rooney had come a generation earlier we may now have been talking about the end of his career rather than the beginning of the winding-down period.”
Yet any hopes of him emulating the likes of Ryan Giggs, Javier Zanetti and Paolo Maldini and playing into his forties might need to be taken with a pinch of salt, unless he can make major changes in his game.
“Rooney, because he started so early, has almost played a career’s worth of games already. So just in terms of miles on the clock there is sort of mileage in your bones, in your joints, in your tendons, in your muscles, which will start to get wear and tear on them,” adds Buckingham.
“Once you’ve started to use up that sort of mileage you begin to pick up those niggles and they don’t get quite as well repaired or as quickly as before. So he’s going to get that kind of mileage on the clock now. Who knows, it might not kick in for him until he’s 32, 33 or 34; just because he’s turning the big three-oh it doesn’t mean it will happen overnight, but it will start to kick in soon.
“But he will have to change his game to prolong his career, and he certainly hasn’t shown that sharpness for some time that we saw when he was 17 or 18. He might have to allow the Martials of the world to do the running and try to be the supplier instead.
“That aggression, pace, speed, the sharpness of the touch that he had when he was younger, they are all the sorts of things that, now he’s into his thirties, will start to wane. His fitness and ability to play out 90 minutes will still be there. That sharpness, perhaps not so much.”
So when Rooney celebrates his 30th birthday he will no doubt do so knowing that he needs to remain as professional as possible, and not just because he has Sunday’s Manchester derby to prepare for.
England’s former boy wonder is now becoming a veteran, and is entering the phase of his career which will require him to work harder than ever to retain his place as one of the country’s leading players.
Source: GOAL
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