The Athletic

Welcome to the Athletic

Welcome to the Athletic Football podcast, I'm Ian Irving, and on today's show,

we're all about Wayne Rooney's return to the states as DC

United manager at a club of course where he certainly made a lasting impression as a player

pinballs to Rooney Roelph oh oh it's in the neck oh oh oh it's emberlin

Pablo Mauer soccer writer for the Athletic, is with us.

He had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Rooney before his first press conference,

so we'll be hearing from the man himself over the course of this podcast.

We've got senior writer for the athletic Olly Kay here too,

who's followed Wayne's career intently from bursting onto the scene at

Everton. Plus, we'll hear from our Derby correspondent Elias Burke.

Pablo, thank you for doing this. You've had a busy day, so well done for fitting us in.

What was Wayne's impact like landing again in the US? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I covered his arrival as a player and I think I noted in a piece I wrote that, you know, when he arrived at the airport as a player, there were, you know, probably several hundred fans there, a few dozen journalists. This go round, it was just me. It wasn't a publicized thing. And I guess I

did a little kind of TMZ thing on him. And did you have a welcome sign of some description.

Right, right, exactly. So this obviously happened. It was a much lower profile process. And certainly,

you know, it was a bigger deal when he came here as a player. honestly given the state of things at this united right now this is still a huge deal

kind of a minor publicity coup for them as a club to to get a player just a you know a

footballing figure the stature of Wayne you know installed as their head coach yeah it

certainly worked the first time around as a player, no doubt.

We'll get into the situation at the club and recent results in particular a little bit later on.

But, Ollie, what was your initial reaction to hearing that Wayne's next move as a manager is to go back to DC United?

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