Oliver Brown Sancho must be last big-money prodigy to go sour at United
The career arc of Jadon Sancho holds up a mirror to the talent vortex that is Manchester United today. Nurtured in his late teenage years by Borussia Dortmund, he arrived at Old Trafford in July 2021 amid glad tidings galore. Now, 2½ years on, he is poised to boomerang back to the Ruhrgebiet with his reputation not so much knocked as nuked. There is an argument that Sancho, so disdained by Erik ten Hag that he was forced to train with the academy players, has only himself to blame. But the reality is that this pattern recurs far too often at United to be passed off as coincidence.
Paul Pogba’s route was similarly circular. Developed by United, he forged his reputation at Juventus, only to be prised back by his first club in 2016 for £89million, then a world-record fee. And yet six years and countless squabbles with Jose Mourinho later, it was back to Turin again.
At least Pogba amassed a respectable body of work, with 154 appearances and a couple of trophies, even if his 29 goals represented a slight return on his prodigious gifts. As for Sancho, there is no mitigation, as he returns to Dortmund with his promise dismally unfulfilled.
United are making quite the habit of this. In 2014, they handed their iconic No7 jersey, the shirt of George Best and Eric Cantona, to Angel Di Maria. The success of that decision can be summarised by the sourness of his wife Jorgelina, who described the couple’s quality of life in Manchester in less-thandiplomatic terms. And what of Alexis Sanchez? Suffice to say that despite the Chilean joining in his prime, and on £500,000 a week, he only ever resembled an imposter.
It is to this ignoble tradition that Sancho’s spell must be added. The failure could hardly be starker. One moment he was the young phenomenon for whom United felt justified in breaking the bank, especially having bargained Dortmund down to £73million. But the next, he was a pariah, the wastrel in whom Ten Hag saw such little potential that United arranged to have his food brought across from the first-team canteen in a lunch box. However much his riches dulled the pain, it has been a humiliating fall from grace.
The crucial question here is whether fault lies more with Sancho or United.
Ten Hag has been candid in his version of events, insisting in December 2022 that Sancho “wasn’t fit enough, physically or mentally”. Scotching any hopes of a reset this season, the manager disclosed last September that he was not picking Sancho due to performances in training. “You have to reach the level every day at Manchester United,” he said, acidly. It was this remark that compelled the winger to bite back on social media, pleading with supporters not to believe everything they read.
If Sancho can be blamed for anything, it is his wretched form, with his three most recent substitute appearances making a mockery of United’s theory that he could be a galvanising force from wide areas. But suggestions of a poor attitude have been disputed by his camp. Is Ten Hag correct to have consigned him to such a lonely exile? In a sense, the answer is immaterial. What matters most is that this whole sorry storyline – the rotting on the vine of a once-stellar player and the ensuing power struggle with the
manager – is an increasingly familiar one at United.
It happened with Pogba. We saw it with Sanchez, too, as his succession of half-hearted displays invited accusations of indolence. Di Maria was castigated by many United fans as a waste of money, only to hit back by labelling Louis van Gaal as his worst coach. This grim sequence of claim and counter-claim is but one facet of the dysfunction at United since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013.
The deeper worry is that the club are no longer the finishing school they once were for the brightest stars. Ferguson made an art form of polishing his signings until they gleamed. Would Cristiano Ronaldo’s evolution from Sporting Lisbon prodigy into all-time great even be conceivable under the present United regime? Ten Hag might have the same autocratic tendencies as Ferguson, but nothing like the same instinct for cultivating a player’s gifts. The record of Antony, the man he was keenest to sign, has been an unmitigated horror. And now he has presided over Sancho’s premature exit.
Even those who arrived with luminous CVS, such as Casemiro and Raphael Varane, have neglected to provide the spark of ignition. How is it that so many players can regress in the same short space of time? It suggests an institutional weakness that Sir Jim Ratcliffe should, in his role in charge of football operations, waste no time in investigating. For United can ill afford another episode as sad and self-defeating as the Sancho experiment.