Manchester United icon Wayne Rooney has secured new back-up job if management career fails

Pay your TV football subscription for access to live games broadcast at unsuitable kick-off times, insufferable Gillette adverts and pundits telling you nothing you couldn’t see yourself.

We’re now used to the first, will hopefully soon see the back of the second but will all have to continue to endure the third. It was never supposed to be this way.

It’s been forgotten why punditry was introduced in the first place and why viewers once stuck around to listen to what was said. Authoritative figures in the game gave insight into tactics, play patterns and thought processes that the common viewer would not have otherwise known.

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Maybe there is only so much that can be said, especially with the amount of games on TV today, but match analysis has now turned into a soapbox for relevance and profile-boosting, rather than a medium for unknown detail for the viewer.

Post-match reaction has become more akin to a podcast chat, so much so that Sky Sports briefly released these clips as audio episodes at one point. Perhaps that is just the world we are now living in, but content is nothing without substance.

The truth is punditry is an art and a skill. Too often, former players fail to provide insight and resort to merely giving their own opinion blanketed by an outrageous remark or dry banter, which, quite frankly, anyone with a microphone can do.

Only a few pundits break that mould and Wayne Rooney might just be one of them. After Manchester United’s 1-0 defeat to Arsenal, he indicated he had intel that some injured United players could have in fact participated.

"Some of them injured players can play 100 per cent,” he