Wayne Rooney and Marouane Fellaini: the poster boys of how Manchester United lost their way

Draw a Venn diagram featuring Everton and Manchester United and the closed circles in the centre would feature Wayne Rooney and Marouane Fellaini. Sunday’s meeting may not. It could be a reunion without men who, in their different ways, unite and divide the clubs. Rooney is definitely suspended. Fellaini has been injured.

Once a Blue, later a Red, they produced around £55 million for the coffers at Goodison Park while offering proof of the gravitational pull Old Trafford exerts. They can seem opposites, with Rooney destined for the pantheon of United greats and Fellaini forever deemed a misfit, but each, in his own way, epitomises the post-Sir Alex Ferguson club.

Had the great Scot delayed his retirement for a year, the probability is that neither would be found at United today: Fellaini would surely never have joined, while the scene seemed set for Rooney to go in the summer of 2013. Instead, the Englishman is captain, the Belgian one of the longer-serving players in the squad.

Now Rooney, despite a recent upturn in form, is a symbol of decline, mirroring United’s regression. He has scored 51 goals in three-and-a-third seasons since Ferguson left compared to 100 in his final four years under the Scot. At the same time, he has signed the most lucrative contract in the history of English football, illustrating that United can be prey for rapacious agents.

The sense is that Rooney was protected for too long by celebrity and status. Louis van Gaal did him few favours when he stated that, as captain, the 31-year-old had “privileges” when it came to selection. In contrast, in between the occasional elements of brutality and sentimentality, Ferguson’s United projected the image of a meritocracy.

Rooney is a sponsor-pleasing presence in the team, a name whose fame helps attract commercial partners. He has been integral to Ed Woodward’s vision of United as the Northern European Galacticos, bringing glamour as supposed superstars were bolted on to a group that rarely exhibited the selfless cohesion Ferguson valued. Yet Rooney has been emblematic of a star vehicle where the stars no longer shine as brightly. Some have been aged (Zlatan Ibrahimovic), underachieving (Angel Di Maria) or both (Radamel Falcao). Rooney falls into each category at times.

The newer, flashier United make a greater show of celebrating achievements as they have become rarer. Now the feats lie in statistical landmarks. Ryan Giggs passed Sir Bobby Charlton’s United appearance record in the 2008 Champions League final; Rooney may top his goal record in a nondescript Europa League match against Zorya Luhansk. That would feel a telling indictment of United's changing circumstances.

But Rooney remains a link with the Ferguson days. Fellaini signalled a break with it. He was the first major signing to arrive thereafter. He represented the first of the panic buys, the trailblazer for the deadline-day signings (Jose Mourinho, by doing his business earlier, has turned his back on that particular policy) and the earliest and most extreme example of those arrivals who simply did not seem a United player.

Fellaini began the now annual tradition of signing at least one central midfielder. He was a pioneering recruit in another sense, too: he and Rooney are two of the many options to operate as a No. 10, along with Ibrahimovic, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Juan Mata, Ander Herrera and Paul Pogba, all other arrivals in the last three years.

Through no fault of his own, Fellaini highlights how United have bought players, rather than purchasing to a plan. They have compiled a sometimes lopsided squad, not a balanced team. Mourinho’s job has been complicated by the myriad of options at his disposal, many lending themselves to different styles of play. For much of the time, there has been no logical starting 11. It explains why United seem in a state of constant transition.

In Fellaini’s defence, he has not been as poor as his critics would suggest. He has been an easy target in a scapegoat culture where it is easier to find fault with United players than it was in previous years. The notion of Fellaini as a symbolic figure is underlined by the way his best season at Old Trafford so far, 2014-15, was the campaign when they recorded their best post-Ferguson finish, fourth. The fact the others were seventh and fifth would suggest Fellaini, an expert in ending up between fifth and eighth in his Everton days, belongs to the breed who can contribute but are not quite good enough to really prosper at United.

His prowess in the spring of 2015, either as a No. 10 or a raiding inside-left, was using a physical player in a technical position, something that, like scrambling around in the Europa League, is out of keeping with United’s history. Like his early-season deployment as a holding midfielder, it was one of a series of quick fixes, working for a while but unravelling quickly without providing a lasting formula for success.

Fellaini has been a stick with which to beat David Moyes, Van Gaal and now Mourinho, who described him this week as the “natural replacement” for the rather more gifted Pogba. There is something about him, ungainly and conspicuous, that has made him a magnet for mockery. It is not just who he is, but what he stands for: the antithesis of the farsighted transfer policy that led to the recruitment of Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, where potential was prioritised over commercial aspects or desperation and where players were unearthed whose peaks proved glorious. Perhaps the eventual verdict will be that, in Anthony Martial, Eric Bailly and Pogba, United have reconnected with their past. But in the meantime, the labouring Rooney and the lumbering Fellaini are the faces and, in the Belgian’s case, hairstyle of how they lost their way.