Wayne Rooney knows he took the difficult option with Everton return but it was worth it for his son's reaction

The 31-year-old confirmed his return to Goodison Park after a 13 year absence on Sunday

Wayne Rooney poses in Everton's new away shirt (Getty/Everton FC)

The signs outside Goodison Park proclaimed Everton as a club of firsts. The first to construct a purpose-built stadium, the first and only British club to stage a World Cup semi-final, the first to spend 100 seasons in the top flight.

For Wayne Rooney it was all about the second time around and the homecoming that would see his career end in the blue shirt in which he began it. There would have been several more lucrative ways to have said goodbye. Shanghai and Los Angeles would have offered more money and less pressure but neither city would have given him this.

As he moved through a throng of autograph hunters outside Goodison, he looked tanned, he looked fit and faced with a battery of cameras he smiled a lot and he smiled easily. It has been a long time since you could say that about Rooney at Manchester United.

“There is always more money if you look long enough and hard enough,” he said. “I know that the pressure on me to perform will be greater at Everton than it would have been at any other club but I am ready for that.

“My dad is a huge Evertonian and he has been travelling to Manchester to watch me play for the last 13 years but he’ll have a five-minute drive now so he’s happy. I have bought my eldest boy, Kai, to Goodison a few times. He’s got a season-ticket here and when I told him I was going back to Everton it was the happiest I have ever seen him.

“I had known for the last couple of weeks I was going back but I had kept it quiet from him. I had kept it quiet from my mum and dad because I knew they wouldn’t be able to hold it in and I didn’t tell Kai because I didn’t want him speaking to his mates. When I told Kai, he jumped on me, he was absolutely made up. To come back and watch his dad play; he’ll be buzzing.”

It was November when he first started thinking about leaving Old Trafford. He had thought about going before, of course. There was the breakdown in his relationship with Sir Alex Ferguson that led to him handing in a transfer request and criticising the great helmsman’s signings. But they had wanted him then and now, after he was dropped in the wake of a humbling defeat at Watford, there was the sense they wanted him no longer.

“I spoke to Jose Mourinho in the January to see what his opinion was and he said he wanted me to stay until the end of the season. I helped him in the games he wanted me to play but for the sake of my career I had to move forward. It was a sad moment but after 13 years I felt I had to leave. I had started the season quite well but then I had a bad game, Watford away, and that was it.”

The strangest moments of his final season at Manchester United were the days the club won their two trophies, the League Cup and the Europa League. “I had not lost the joy of playing football but it was frustrating,” he said. “The lads who were playing were having two-day recovery sessions and all the lads who were on the bench or not in the squad were training together so you weren’t really training with the first team.

“The hardest thing was lifting the two trophies. You don’t feel you deserve it because you haven’t been part of the game. That was hard. You don’t celebrate as if you were out there on the pitch.”

Wayne Rooney poses in Everton's new away shirt (Getty/Everton FC)

Rooney at 31 is a different player than the raw, brilliantly gifted teenager who left Everton in the summer of 2004, when he looked like he might become the best footballer in the world. He fell short but not as much as his critics might have you believe.

Goodison Park is much the same but underneath the club is far wealthier and more dynamic than the one he left. Rooney is Ronald Koeman’s sixth signing of the summer and Gylfi Sigurdsson might become the seventh.

“The training ground is different but what makes me feel back home is all the staff who are still there and who I have known since I was young,” Rooney said. “It just felt so right, so comfortable when I walked back into the dressing room.”

He knows the argument that he has been in decline for 18 months, that his readiness to play in almost any position has cost him his edge. Ferguson argued that the sheer work rate of his game meant Rooney’s career would begin to wither after the age of 28.

“I need to play,” said Rooney. “I know I am at my best when I play. I know lots of players who will miss two days’ training and then just train one day before a game. That’s not me.”

He is aware of the dates that lie ahead of him. He recalls the day in December 2002 when he struck the crossbar in the Merseyside derby, the closest he came to scoring against Liverpool in an Everton shirt. There is the chance of a fourth World Cup to wash away the memories of the ones in Germany, South Africa and Brazil that were stuffed full of disappointment. England’s record goalscorer has not played an international for eight months.

“Gareth Southgate had a decision to make as Jose did,” he said. “I spoke to him. I wasn’t playing the football I like and I don’t think you should play for your country if you are not playing for your club, so I understand his decision fully.

“If I had gone to China, which was an option, I would have called it a day myself. The time difference, the difference in the standard of the league . . .it wouldn’t have been right for me to carry on. First, I want to get back playing for Everton in the Premier League. If I do well, Gareth will either put me back in the squad – or not.”