The 32-year-old Schweinsteiger, who announced his retirement from worldwide football last month, is yet to make a first-team appearance this season and has been training with the club’s reserves. This time past year, Rashford was merely anxious about playing for United’s academy side, but ended the season in the first team and played for England at Euro 2016.
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Mourinho said: “I think the reality is that he was one of the most successful assistant managers in the country with invaluable experience”.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible”.
“We have a decision completely made about Paul Pogba, Ander Herrera, Morgan Schneiderlin, Marouane Fellaini and Michael Carrick”. That’s five players for two positions. A return to Bayern Munich, who allowed the player to leave last summer, was never really on the cards for the 32-year-old, despite the club’s president hitting out at Mourinho’s treatment of the player.
Though, with that being said, Mourinho made it abundantly clear that Schweinsteiger would indeed need a lot of things to fall in his favour for that to happen.
“I am quite surprised that Mr Rummenigge is not here now to take him back”.
Schweinsteiger could have been a quality asset at Old Trafford, but he simply doesn’t fit in to Mourinho’s structure and I don’t see him coming back into the fold anytime soon. It’s his life, his career, he has a contract with Man United.
Southampton captain Jose Fonte and Real Madrid’s Raphael Varane are believed to have been on United’s target list, but neither will be moving ahead of next Wednesday’s deadline, inspiring Mourinho to make this declaration.
“That’s not a problem for us”.
“Football is made of decisions”. I’ve done that all my career, not just me, everyone does it. Some players react in a different way and have different kinds of decisions.
“Bastian is not speaking a lot. He is free to do that in an objective and polite way like he did”. “There are no problems at all”.
Ex-United assistant boss Mike Phelan is the man now in charge, and Mourinho feels he deserves to be given the job full-time.
“I think it’s not intelligent to make a decision about a manager because he wins or loses a match”.
“He has managed to organise the people, organise his team”.
“Are they defensive? Yes”.
However, the arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic means Rashford will find it far tougher to get into the team. “I think he deserves the job”.
“If we have any kind of opportunity, I have a few young players in the academy and I’ll be more than happy to give them an acceleration in their process and bring them up”.
The Premier League side will face 19-times Turkish champions Fenerbahce, who missed out on the Champions League group stage after a 4-3 aggregate defeat by AS Monaco in the third qualifying round.
“I think that more points will be needed to win the competition because numerous top teams under-performed previous year, which was fantastic for the beauty of the competition”, Mourinho added. But I think it is very hard for him [to play].
“Not surrounded by helicopters waiting for somebody to arrive or leave.
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I am more than happy with the squad I have”.
