Fair to say there’s really only one story in town on this damp Wednesday morn. That’s right: Marcus Rashford visited a school and delivered some presents. Everything else is a footnote.
A Winter’s Tale
You’re going to have to indulge Mediawatch here. We are painfully aware that we spend a large part of pretty much every edition complaining loudly about journalists pretending a footballer or manager has said something controversial or interesting or controversially interesting for clicks.
The brutal digs that are neither brutal nor digs. The subtle clues, the transfer hints, the silences broken. More recently, of course, we’ve welcomed the displaying of ‘true colours’ and the ‘speaking of volumes’ into the disingenuity fold. Rich Mediawatch fodder one and all. We’re not about to stop calling them out.
But what we do need to do today is now perform a guileless, grinding u-turn and draw attention to the way Henry Winter chose to break those Marcus Rashford quotes, which are genuinely and legitimately a huge story.
First, Winter chose to reveal them not on his own Substack or even to hawk them around the traditional media as a freelance, but in a massive long blue-tick Twitter post. That’s a very odd flex, but whatever. It’s not the main issue.
Remember, these are the Marcus Rashford quotes we’re talking about.
“For me, personally, I think I’m ready for a new challenge and the next steps.
“When I leave it’s going to be ‘no hard feelings’. You’re not going to have any negative comments from me about Manchester United. That’s me as a person.
“If I know that a situation is already bad I’m not going to make it worse. I’ve seen how other players have left in the past and I don’t want to be that person. When I leave I’ll make a statement and it will be from me.”
That really is a big deal. There is no subtle clue or transfer hint here. He says ‘when’ not ‘if’ and flat out says he’s ready to do it.
Everyone else has picked up on those quotes and done exactly what you’d expect.
Let’s rattle through some of the intros.
The Sun go with:
MARCUS RASHFORD has admitted he is “ready for a new challenge” after being left out of the Manchester derby.
In the Mirror we have:
Marcus Rashford has admitted that he’s ready a ‘new challenge’ amid reports that Manchester United have put him up for sale.
The Star:
Marcus Rashford has confirmed he’s ready to take on a new challenge.
The Daily Mail:
Marcus Rashford has revealed he is ready to leave Manchester United via an astonishing interview posted on social media site X.
A formerly good football website:
Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford has admitted that he wants to leave his boyhood club after Ruben Amorim didn’t pick him for the Manchester derby.
You get the idea.
So what intro did Henry give the story that inspired all of these?
Marcus Rashford had a day off today so he returned to his old primary school, Button Lane, south Manchester, and handed out 420 Christmas presents to all the pupils.
It’s brilliant. It’s the most local weekly paper intro imaginable, if local weekly papers were still a thing.
Winter’s not done there, though. He somehow gets through another 400 words across five chunky, waffle-heavy paragraphs before any mention of the quotes that now quite rightly dominate Wednesday morning’s football coverage.
It’s just magnificently and wilfully odd. It is the most buried a lede has surely ever been. Mediawatch is scratching its head desperately trying to puzzle it out. We can’t quite bring ourselves to believe Winter is so far out of the loop as to think the presents for local kids is the actual angle here.
The apparent naive innocence of it all must surely be false. This must be a carefully choreographed way for Rashford’s camp to get the news out there while trying to make sure he doesn’t emerge as the villain, with Winter a willing collaborator.
But it really is enormously f***ing weird to see quotes like that from a player of Rashford’s profile at a club of Man United’s profile being broken in the style of a local newspaper story from 1998 on a social-media platform that almost nobody any longer enjoys and whose original USP was its absolute insistence on brevity forcing everyone to get immediately to the point.
Take aim
Of course, the sheer BOMBSHELL nature of those Rashford quotes was still never going to be enough. You might think that what he said is story enough for even the most rabid of click-hungry football media outlet, but that really is never going to be the case.
So while at one end we have Winter’s own bizarrely idiosyncratic delivery method, and then a huge middleground of broadly accurate reporting of the hugely newsworthy words, at the other end you get this from – surprise, surprise – the Mirror.
Marcus Rashford takes aim at Man Utd team-mates and promises transfer announcement
Of course, even by the intro they’ve magically managed to find room for the all-important word ‘former’, a word that shifts the meaning altogether from the headline’s very obviously intentional implication-by-omission of a rift with his current team-mates.
Marcus Rashford has promised ‘not to make a bad situation worse’ by leaving Manchester United under a cloud like some of his former team-mates.
Honestly prefer Winter’s way.
MORE ON THE RASHFORD BOMBSHELL FROM F365…
👉 Rashford to Arsenal, Garnacho to Atletico? Six potential 2025 Man Utd sales to fund Amorim rebuild
👉 Marcus Rashford leaving Man Utd: A case for the Premier League Big Eight
👉 Marcus Rashford is ‘talentless ambitionless spineless waste of space’
End game
And it’s not just Rashford’s own quotes that are being twisted despite already being plenty strong enough as they actually are.
The Mail give us this headline, in their trademark windbag style:
Paul Scholes declares ‘it’s THE END’ for Marcus Rashford at Man United and questions his choices on and off the field – amid fallout from his bombshell interview conceding he is ready to leave
And a double-down intro:
Paul Scholes has shared that he believes ‘it’s the end’ for Marcus Rashford at Manchester United, just hours after the player announced his plans to leave the club in a bombshell interview.
Actual Scholes quote:
“It feels like the end for him.”
These are the ones that boil our p*ss the most, we think. Because it’s still very strong, isn’t it? That’s still a perfectly solid line on which a story can hang – ‘Paul Scholes has said ‘it feels like the end’ for Marcus Rashford at Manchester United…’ – but they just can’t stop themselves sexing it up a bit.
Absolutely textbook ‘just hours’, though. Credit where it’s due.
Oh Teddy, Teddy
Okay, we’re not saying we thought there wouldn’t be that much absolute bullsh*t around the Rashford BOMBSHELL. Of course there was going to be bullsh*t. There is always bullsh*t. But we did think that the strength of the actual lines from the actual people actually involved might manage to mitigate the overall levels of that bullsh*t at least a tiny bit.
Mediawatch has rarely felt like more of a sweet summer child.
This, from the Express, is perhaps the most egregious of all that bullsh*t.
Marcus Rashford valued at eye-watering £100m as Man Utd ‘agree on January transfer’
Now we know the Express don’t like weirdly long headlines quite as much as their Mail brothers and sisters, but it does seem a real shame that there wasn’t any space available at all to squeeze in a really quite significant caveat.
Because, you’ll be shocked to learn, Manchester United have not valued Marcus Rashford as £100m for a January transfer as so heavily implied here. The far less exciting and pithy but indisputably more honest headline for that story is in fact this:
Marcus Rashford valued at eye-watering £100m by Teddy Sheringham as Man Utd ‘agree on January transfer’
