Rio Ferdinand has revealed he once rang Wayne Rooney to complain about two Manchester United players ‘dancing on Instagram’ while the team were struggling.
Ferdinand was part of the last United team to win the Premier League in Sir Alex Ferguson’s final season at Old Trafford.
The United legend finished his Red Devils career with six Premier League titles and having lifted the Champions League trophy in 2008.
Manchester United have suffered an alarming fall from grace over the past decade, failing to add to their haul of Premier League trophies under a succession of high-profile managers.
While Ferdinand left United in 2014, Rooney stayed at the club for another three seasons before leaving the fallen Premier League giants in the summer of 2017.
Before he left, Rooney was contacted by Ferdinand and asked about a perceived drop in standards at Manchester United, epitomised by videos of Paul Pogba and Jesse Lingard dancing in the dressing room despite the club’s ongoing struggles.
Ferdinand was speaking to his former United teammate Phil Jones on his YouTube channel when he revealed he had phoned up Rooney to question some of the player’s social media activity.
Reflecting on the state of the Manchester United dressing room when he first joined the club, Jones said: ‘Back then, when you look at the dressing room we had… we had so many incredible, powerful leaders that wouldn’t let anything get in the way of the team’s performance and the team winning.
‘That winning mentality was so strong and powerful that no one that came in could disrupt that.
‘I think now players maybe don’t have the ability to call people out anymore and the power to tell them, “that’s not what we do at this football club… don’t come in here and start acting like that, that doesn’t work here”.
‘I’m not saying that happens every single day at the club but if we lost a game, we’d have a meeting the next day, not even with the coaches. The leaders would be saying, “this is not good enough” after one loss.’
Asked when that began to change and United’s dressing room started to lose its way, Ferdinand interjected and said: ‘I’ll tell you when it changed, from the outside at least.
‘I rang Wazza [Wayne Rooney] when I saw Paul Pogba and Jesse Lingard dancing on Instagram when we were sixth in the league.
‘I rang Wazza and said, “What’s going on here? How are you allowing this?” And he said you can’t say nothing man, it’s not the same anymore.
‘He said it’s not just those two, there would be a big group looking at me like I’m mad if I said anything.’
Jones then added: ‘Can you imagine that happening in our dressing room?! You would get torched.’
Far from getting back to a position to dominate the Premier League, Manchester United still appear to be going backwards under struggling manager Erik ten Hag.
The Red Devils have endured their worst ever start to a Premier League campaign, taking eight points from their opening seven games to sit just 14th in the table going into the international break.
Following Sunday’s goalless draw with Aston Villa, Ten Hag claimed his team displayed signs of progress.
‘I think it’s the fourth clean sheet this season,’ the former Ajax boss said. ‘You see we had a very good organisation and togetherness. There was good character and good spirit as a team. Determined, resilient.
‘We almost didn’t concede a chance, when you defend like this and get some luck, in the end they had a big chance but it was almost the only chance I think.
‘We created some chances, also not so many chances. We hit the crossbar and also Rashford had chances. But the two teams were really balanced.
‘In Porto our build-up was brilliant, so good in the first 25 minutes, we out-played Porto. Also Palace, in possession we were so good, we have had games this season where we are good.
‘But today we didn’t create too many chances, but also we played a great team. We create loads of chances in our seven games but we have to step up.
‘We have to take into consideration Hojlund is returning, he’s still coming up to full fitness. But others are stepping up. I was impressed from Rashford, also Garnacho is so good, and Antony at the end.’
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