📅 August 10, 2026

Marcus Rashford Is Back in Training, and the Number 14 Tells You Where He Stands

By Mav Jones · Manchester United fan writer

Nine United players flew out of Manchester on Sunday morning to join up with the squad in Ireland. One of them hadn’t trained with the first team since December 2024.

Marcus Rashford is back.

He travelled with Kobbie Mainoo, who was also given an extended break after the World Cup, along with Benjamin Sesko, Senne Lammens, Matheus Cunha, Matthijs de Ligt, Karl Darlow and young pair JJ Gabriel and Tynan Thompson. The group linked up with Michael Carrick’s camp at Carton House ahead of Wednesday’s friendly against Leeds United at Croke Park.

There’s a squad number waiting for him too, and it’s the part of this that actually tells you something.

Fourteen is not a throwaway number

The 10 is gone. Matheus Cunha took it while Rashford was away and has done more than enough to keep it, so the shirt Rashford wore for most of his United career belongs to someone else now. That was always going to be the awkward bit of any return.

What he’s been handed instead is 14, and at Old Trafford that one carries a bit of warmth. Javier Hernandez wore it. Jesse Lingard wore it. Christian Eriksen had it most recently. It’s a first-team number rather than a squad-filler in the thirties, and giving it to a player who spent the best part of two years being told he wasn’t part of the plan looks like a decision, not an accident.

There’s a neat symmetry to it as well. Fourteen is the number he wore at Barcelona last season, so he keeps the shirt that went with the best football of his career.

Worth being straight about one thing: the club hasn’t put out an official squad list confirming it yet. The 14 has been reported by Goal, Yahoo Sports, Footy Headlines and a stack of others over the past two days, and nobody is disputing it, but at least one squad-number tracker still has Rashford’s slot blank. Treat it as very likely rather than stamped.

Assuming it holds, the message is hard to misread. You don’t give a coveted number to someone you’re trying to move on in the last three weeks of the window.

He was excellent in Spain, and that matters

The version of Rashford that left in 2024 was a player nobody could get a tune out of. The version that came back has just had the best season of his career.

At Barcelona he made 49 appearances, scored 14 goals and set up 14 more. He won La Liga and the Spanish Super Cup. He scored the goal that sealed the title in the win over Real Madrid in May, which is about as big a moment as that league offers. Before that, the half-season at Aston Villa produced 4 goals and 6 assists in 17 games, which was already a sign that the problem was never the player’s legs.

Twenty-eight is not old for a forward. He’s been playing for two years under coaches who wanted him, and it worked both times.

Why he’s still a United player

Barcelona had a permanent option somewhere around £26 million and chose not to take it, going for Anthony Gordon instead. A £40 million release clause that would have allowed a move to another Premier League club came and went in early July without anyone triggering it. Approaches from Saudi Arabia and Turkey were turned down by Rashford himself.

His contract runs to June 2028. Fabrizio Romano’s read is that he intends to stay unless a top European club comes calling in the next few weeks, and there’s no sign of one.

You can frame that as the market shrugging. You can also frame it as United keeping a forward who scored 14 goals for the Spanish champions, on wages they’re already paying, in a squad that could use him. Given where this relationship was eighteen months ago, that’s a decent place to land.

Where he fits under Carrick

This is the genuinely interesting part, because Rashford has never played a minute for Michael Carrick. Everything that soured at Old Trafford happened under Ruben Amorim, and none of the people involved in that are still here. He walks back in with no history to work around.

The front line isn’t short of bodies. Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Sesko all have claims, and Shea Lacey has been one of the stories of pre-season in the 10 role. But nobody in that group does the specific thing Rashford does when he’s right, which is run at a full back from the left and go past him, or take off in behind a high line and get there first. United have had plenty of players who want the ball to feet this summer. They’ve had very few who threaten the space behind.

Carrick spent the PSG draw experimenting with Luke Shaw overlapping and Patrick Dorgu tucking inside. A left-sided forward who stays wide and runs is a different answer to the same question, and it’s one Carrick hasn’t had available to him yet.

When we might see him

Wednesday at Croke Park against Leeds is the obvious one, and it’s a proper occasion in itself. It’ll be the first club football match ever played at the ground and the first football of any kind there since 2009. Some reports have him involved there, others suggest Saturday’s game with AC Milan is more realistic given how little he’s done since the World Cup. Either way, both come before the season starts.

Then it’s Hull City away on 22 August, 12:30 kick-off, and the start of Carrick’s first full campaign.

Rashford’s last United appearance was a 2-1 Europa League win at Viktoria Plzen in December 2024. He was 27 then and looked finished at the club he’d been at since he was seven. He’s 28 now, he’s a Spanish champion, and he’s got a first-team number and a manager with no reason to hold a grudge.

Plenty of these stories don’t get a second chapter. This one just did.

Our full 2026/27 fixture list, with kick-off times converted to ET, is on the Fixtures page. For more on the squad Rashford is walking back into, read our breakdown of the new midfield against PSG and every summer signing United have made.

The full picture: Marcus Rashford and Manchester United: the full story

Source: Sky Sports — What are United’s plans to reintegrate Marcus Rashford?