Marcus Rashford’s love affair with Manchester United is coming to a sad, mysterious end
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Rashford’s revelation that he is ready for a ‘new challenge’ looks set to bring an end to a 20-year love story with Manchester United after a rollercoaster decade in the first team. We already know everything there is to know about Marcus Rashford, one of the most famous athletes in Britain, a born-and-bred Manchester United fan who joined the club aged seven, with a social conscience and an eye for goal, a player of undoubted gift who has often struggled to locate it. And yet it can also feel like we don’t really know him at all.
![[Rashford reacts with frustration during United’s Europa League game in Plzen]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/18/12/d0a32e48db0a41c385645f14d27d5ba2.jpg)
With Rashford, there is always a sense that his world is being stage-managed, that his genuine passion for helping his community is needlessly gift-wrapped in PR speak and photo opportunities, like an ailing prime minister in The Thick of It. Take this latest story, that he is ready to leave Old Trafford for a “new challenge”, a message seemingly choreographed while handing out Christmas presents to children at his old primary school. The journalist trusted to deliver the interview, Henry Winter, wrote the story as a long tweet which began not with the bombshell news that Rashford wanted to leave United – that was left until much later – but that, on handing out gifts, a four-year-old told him: “Thank you for the food as well, Marcus.”.
![[Rashford celebrates the Carabao Cup final victory over Newcastle at Wembley]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/02/26/21/467c1b4ad8de18a6e540ad0613adfa8bY29udGVudHNlYXJjaGFwaSwxNjc3NTMyOTkw-2.71157215.jpg)
Whether or not you choose to file it under things that didn’t happen, it is hard to escape the feeling that the more we hear from Rashford, the further we get from knowing him, as if he’s caught in a never-ending quest to curate his own authenticity. Does he want to be the humble star who saved children’s school meals, or the world-class striker rattling in goals, or the tearaway who hit a Belfast nightclub hours after a game? He can be all of those at once, of course. But at 27, does Rashford even know the answer?.
![[Marcus Rashford leaves the Old Trafford pitch after defeat by Nottingham Forest earlier this month]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/18/11/newFile-1.jpg)
