Jose Mourinho insists Manchester United should sell Wayne Rooney to a rival club

Jose Mourinho

Jose Mourinho says that Manchester United should sell Wayne Rooney to a rival club.

Mourinho claims Manchester United should have no doubts about selling the striker to a domestic rival.

He insisted it could damage the Premier League if he is not allowed to move. Chelsea have already made two bids for the forward but will wait until after the sides play at Old Trafford on Monday before making a third approach.

He believes that if United sell Rooney to a foreign club, they would be damaging the league,claiming that players moving between rivals should not be a major issue.

As reported by The Guardian, he said, “That old-fashioned mentality of ‘I don’t sell players to the same country’ doesn’t help the market and doesn’t help the players. You see in Italy, it happens every season without any problem. The player wants to move from Milan to Inter, from Inter to Milan, from Roma to Juventus, from Juventus to Inter, and they do this all the time. You see [Filippo] Inzaghi, he played for Juventus, for Milan, for Inter. From the big ones I think only [Francesco] Totti stayed all his life. [Andrea] Pirlo – Inter, Milan, Juventus.

“Sometimes you push players abroad when you should be interested in keeping them in your league, because when you keep players in your league you are contributing to make your league the best league. So when you want to sell and you are pushing the players abroad I think you are giving the wrong contribution to the league where you are.”

Mourinho is determined to step up his interest next week and insisted his tactics in the transfer window are not merely intended to unsettle the player.

He further said: “I don’t understand that [argument] because it’s normal that we want to strengthen our squad in every position. We did it from the goalkeeper, we did it in midfield, we did it in creative positions – we didn’t in the striker’s position where we have kept the players we had last year.

“I think it is basic and normal that we want to give more quality to the whole structure. It is obvious that the striker’s position was a position where we would try to improve.”

“We are going to get a maximum of two players in this transfer window. If we get the second piece, it will be the final piece. Let’s see, [if] we make the bid and they say no again, what do we lose? One email.

“The two answers we got from Manchester United were ‘we don’t accept the bid, we are not interested in selling the player’. That’s the only official contact we have had. It is the same till Monday, we have nothing else we would like to add to it and we want to respect them and football.”