‘Could have been a god but chose to be a Devil’. The 2004 European Championships and Wayne Rooney’s departure from Everton Football Club

The world of elite football is woven from complex and intriguing relations informing the identities of players, clubs and supporters, across local, national and international boundaries. Often, key players with a global presence become a catalyst informing such relations. This paper considers one stark example of this: the case of Wayne Rooney, a local Liverpool lad and football protégée who raced through the ranks of Everton's youth academy to establish himself in the first team aged sixteen before being transfered to Manchester United in the summer of 2004 for a fee of £30 million. The paper describes how, set in the wider context of tense dynamics between club and country and between local and national sentiment, the specific manner in which the transfer unfolded pitched Rooney at the centre of an identity defining power struggle between clubs, agents and fans.