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Wayne Rooney
Wayne Mark Rooney (born 24 October 1985) is an English footballer who plays as a striker for Premier League club Manchester United and the England national team.
Rooney made his senior international debut in 2003 becoming the youngest player to represent England (a record later broken by Theo Walcott). He is England’s youngest ever goalscorer. He played at UEFA Euro 2004 and scored four goals, briefly becoming the competition’s youngest goalscorer. Rooney featured at the 2006 and 2010 World Cups and is widely regarded as his country’s best player. He has won the England Player of the Year award twice, in 2008 and 2009. As of June 2012, he has won 75 international caps and scored 29 goals. Along with David Beckham, Rooney is the most red carded player for England, having been sent off twice.
Aged nine, Rooney joined the youth team of Everton, for whom he made his professional debut in 2002. He spent two seasons at the Merseyside club, before moving to Manchester United for £25.6 million in the 2004 summer transfer window. The same year, Rooney acquired the nickname “Wazza”. Since then, with Rooney in the team, United have won the Premier League four times, the 2007–08 UEFA Champions League and two League Cups. He also holds two runner-up medals from the Champions League and has twice finished second in the Premier League. In April 2012, Rooney scored his 180th goal, making him United’s fourth-highest goal-scorer of all time.
In 2009–10, Rooney was awarded the PFA Players’ Player of the Year and the FWA Footballer of the Year. He came fifth in the vote for the 2011 FIFA Ballon d’Or and was named in the FIFPro World 11 for 2011. Rooney has won the ‘Goal of the Season’ award by the BBC’s Match of the Day poll on three occasions, with his bicycle kick against rivals Manchester City winning the ‘Premier League Goal of the 20 Seasons’ award. Rooney is the third highest-paid footballer in the world after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, with an annual income of €20.7m (£18m) including sponsorship deals.
Rooney was born in Croxteth, Liverpool to Thomas Wayne and Jeanette Marie (née Morrey) Rooney. He is of Irish descent and was brought up as a Roman Catholic with younger brothers Graham and John; all three attended Our Lady and St Swithin’s primary school and the De La Salle Humanities College. He grew up supporting his local club Everton.
Rooney began playing for Liverpool Schoolboys and until May 2010 he held the record of 72 goals scored in one season. At age nine, Rooney played for Copplehouse boys’ club in the local Walton and Kirkdale junior league and scored 99 goals in his final season before being spotted by Everton scout Bob Pendleton. Rooney joined Everton at age nine, and was the Everton mascot for the Merseyside derby against Liverpool as an 11-year-old. In the 1995–96 season he scored 114 goals in 29 games for Everton’s under-10s and 11s, and by 15 years old he was playing for the under-19s. He scored eight goals in eight games during Everton’s run to the FA Youth Cup final in 2002. This included one goal in the final defeat against Aston Villa and upon scoring he revealed a T-shirt that read, “Once a Blue, always a Blue.” Rooney was included in the first team squad for their training camp in Austria in the summer of 2002 and scored his first senior goal in a 3–1 friendly victory over SC Weiz on 15 July.
Rooney became the youngest player to play for England when he earned his first cap in a friendly against Australia on 12 February 2003 at seventeen, the same age at which he also became the youngest player to score an England goal. Arsenal youngster Theo Walcott broke Rooney’s appearance record by 36 days in May 2006. This came after Wayne ignored calls from Irish supporters to play for the Republic of Ireland, whom he is eligible to play for due to his Grandmother being born in Ireland.
Rooney met his wife, Coleen Rooney (née McLoughlin), while both were at secondary school. They married on 12 June 2008 after six years of dating, during which Rooney admitted to soliciting prostitution in Liverpool in 2004. ‘”I was young and stupid. It was at a time when I was very young and immature and before I had settled down with Coleen.” He has a tattoo of the words “Just Enough Education to Perform”, the title of an album by his favourite band, the Stereophonics; Coleen arranged for the group to play at their wedding reception. The wedding ran into some controversy with the Catholic Church. The couple held a religious ceremony at the Abbey of Cervara, a converted monastery near Genoa, despite being warned by the local bishop’s office against the plan. The bishop’s office told the Rooneys that La Cervara is deconsecrated and not suitable for a wedding. It suggested a different church, five miles away. Nevertheless, the couple ignored the advice and Father Edward Quinn, their local priest from Croxteth, presided over a ceremony in which rings were exchanged.