Rooney, 41, is not short of ideas for settling an old rivalry.
The former Manchester United and England captain has challenged Jamie Carragher to a boxing match, picking the fight on the TikTok channel of promoter Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions while visiting a boxing gym in Liverpool.
“I’d love to face Carragher, so you can tell him that. Cara, I’d love to face you in the ring,” Rooney said.
Why the gauntlet got thrown now
The challenge lands at an awkward moment for Carragher. The 48-year-old Sky Sports pundit spent last week trying to walk back comments he made on the Stick to Football podcast about Michael Carrick’s job at Old Trafford.
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Carragher had argued that Unai Emery should consider the Manchester United job if Carrick were dismissed, telling Aston Villa fans to “shut the f*** up” and declaring that “Aston Villa will never be Man United” because “there is a chain in football, whether you like it or not.”
Aston Villa threatened legal action on October 30 before dropping it. Carragher apologised on X the following day, calling his language “clumsy and wrong.”
A fighter long before he was a footballer
Rooney made the call-out from Croxteth Amateur Boxing Club in Liverpool, the gym his uncle Richie Rooney helped establish. It is also where Rooney boxed as a boy, until Everton told him at 15 to pick one sport.
“I love boxing. I love watching boxing. But I wasn’t good enough to go down that road,” he told the camera during the visit.
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Rooney has long credited the discipline for the raw physique that carried him through a brutal Premier League career, saying boxing “helped me grow my legs and my muscles.”
Rooney has the younger legs
Rooney is seven years younger than Carragher and spent his adolescence inside a ring, not watching one from a studio seat. Carragher, a defender whose Liverpool career was built on reading the game rather than physical confrontation, has no known boxing background.
Neither man has mentioned a weight, a date or a venue, and Carragher has not publicly responded to Rooney’s call-out.
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