Arsène Wenger was barely bothered by this week’s Wayne Rooney saga and is not surprised by its conclusion.
Just minutes before the Arsenal manager spoke to the media on Friday, news broke that the England striker would be staying at Old Trafford after all. It was a shock to most. The proceeding days had been full of claim and counter-claim after it had emerged over the weekend that the 24-year-old wanted to leave Manchester United.
For Wenger, this story was nothing new and, as for the coverage, he claimed: “When I saw the headlines I just turned the page.”
He went on: “It just shows it wasn’t worth making such a fuss about the story.
“I feel it was a situation where there was not a lot to talk about. You have a player 18 months from [the end of] his contract and so the only surprise for me is that Man United came out.
“But once the club did come out and said that they couldn’t find an agreement it was a message that they wanted to sell.
“Certainly now Rooney has got the guarantees he wanted, you can translate that like you want.
“But that is why I was never really interested in that story because what happened with Wayne Rooney happens to every club every year plenty of times.
“Just because he has a different name it was certainly a story. But it is a super-classical story which happens in every club every week, so I could never understand what was really special in this case.”