DC United star Wayne Rooney revealed Everton s owner Farhad Moshiri was behind his departure from the Premier League club.
Former England captain Rooney returned to boyhood club Everton in 2017-18 after leaving Manchester United as their all-time leading goalscorer, but the 32-year-old only spent a single season at Goodison Park.
Rooney swapped Everton for Washington and he has since scored four goals and set up six others for DC to help boost their play-off chances in MLS.
Reflecting on his Everton exit, Rooney told the Daily Mail: It wasn t easy to leave Man United. But I wasn t playing and that was difficult and Everton was the main reason why I left.
One more sleep.
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— D.C. United (@dcunited)
I wanted to help them move forward and win the first trophy since 1995. That was always a dream of mine but unfortunately that didn t happen. I was a bit disappointed with the way it ended but that s football.
It wasn t just about ending my career at Everton. I could see the club were trying to move forward and bring players in and I wanted to be part of that. I felt we were putting foundations down to maybe win that trophy and have a push at the top six.
What s happened a few times in my career is that I probably needed to be a bit more selfish, which I sometimes find difficult to do. By playing in midfield, I lost my goalscoring threat but the team progressed a bit more and went higher up the table. So maybe if I hadn t done that, I might have scored 20 goals and we would have finished 12th or 13th. That s part of who I am.
I think it was the owner s decision. He obviously knew he was going to bring a lot of players in and I was still on quite a bit of money at Everton and he wanted to free the money up. I was made aware of interest from DC and I saw an article in the newspaper about it and I started to think: What s going on there? Is there something being said?
So I went in to see Sam Allardyce and said: Listen I m not a kid. What s going on? Do you want me here or not? To be fair to Sam he was probably the honest one. He said if he was still there next season I mightn t play as much but he still wanted me to be here and be a big part of things. Then he said: But I m not sure the owner has the same opinion .
Lucho + Señor SZN.
— D.C. United (@dcunited)
Trying to get an honest answer out of the owner took three months. I kept trying and trying. All I wanted was clarity. There were some positives: my four children seeing me play for Everton. Even though my youngest two won t remember, we still have the pictures to look back on when they re older of me at Goodison. There was scoring at Anfield for Everton, scoring my first hat-trick for Everton. But I was just left a bit sad.
It ended badly at 18 when I left the first time. I was a kid and you say things and do things that you don t really understand. But this time, being a bit older and a bit wiser I was only asking for a bit of honesty and that never really seemed to come, except from Sam Allardyce.
