Wayne Rooney

Origins and early life

Wayne Rooney was born in Croxteth, Liverpool, on 24 October 1985, the son of Thomas Rooney and Jeanette Morrey, and was raised a Catholic in an Irish Liverpudlian family.

Work and career

He came up at Everton and, on 19 October 2002, five days short of his seventeenth birthday, hit a last-minute winner from thirty yards against Arsenal that ended a thirty-match unbeaten run and made him the youngest scorer the Premier League had had. Manchester United bought him in August 2004 for a fee that reached twenty-seven million pounds, and he stayed thirteen years. He won five league titles there, the Champions League in 2008, the FA Cup and the Europa League, and on 12 February 2011 he scored the overhead kick against Manchester City that is still the goal people name first.

He finished with 253 goals for United, which remains the club record, and 53 for England in 120 caps, which stood as the national record until Harry Kane passed it. He has since managed Derby County, DC United, Birmingham City and Plymouth Argyle. In September 2026, in the fourth episode of the Disney+ series The Real Rooneys, he said he had recently found out that his mother's mother, his nan, came from a family of Polish Jews, and that his great-grandmother had fled Poland for Liverpool under a name the family believe was Greenburg.

He is a Catholic and says so, and has never presented himself as Jewish; his place in this directory is by descent, on that maternal line and on his own public account of it, which no genealogist has yet gone over.