As Jadon Sancho made his way along the Merck-Stadion sideline, snood pulled up over his face to shield against the sub-zero chill, an Irish-accented voice rang out above the quiet hubbub from the stands. “Sancho! Erik Ten Hag wants to talk to you! You lazy fucker!”
The first part of the viral heckle was way off – Sancho is surely one of the last people on earth Erik Ten Hag wants to talk to – but the second part chimed with the views of many at Old Trafford, including, by the sounds of it, Ten Hag himself.
“It’s not about discipline,” the United manager said over the weekend. “It’s about normal behaviour. That is what you can expect from a top professional. If you want to perform, you need hungry players. You need players with personalities and who are hungry to fight for the badge and fight for this club. And they need to do this in a team.”
On Saturday at least, Sancho produced the normal behaviour of a top professional. He watched the first 57 minutes of Dortmund’s match away to Darmstadt from the bench before being called to replace Jamie Bynoe-Gittens.
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Twenty minutes later he ran off the blindside of Darmstadt’s left-back Emir Karic, collected a pass from Donyell Malen and teed up Marco Reus for 2-0.
“I’m here to be happy again, help the team, smile again,” Sancho enthused afterwards. “It feels like coming back home.”
In a way it is a homecoming for Sancho. He has returned to the level of football where he belongs; a star player for a member of the Bundesliga’s supporting cast, who in recent years have turned themselves into a career launchpad and shop window for young players who aspire to move on to big clubs elsewhere.
Sancho of course went through that process himself between 2017, when he left Manchester City for Dortmund, and 2021, when Manchester United bought him for €85 million.
By the time of his move he was one of the most highly-regarded attackers in world football, thanks to the phenomenal numbers of goals and assists he had produced playing alongside Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham etc.
He finished at Dortmund with 50 goals and 59 assists in 138 appearances, or to put it more precisely, 109 goal contributions in 110 matches’ worth of playing time. On paper, he looked almost as sure-fire a success at a bigger club as Haaland and Bellingham would go on to be at Manchester City and Real Madrid.
So why did he fail so utterly in the Premier League?
Some allowance must be made for Manchester United producing a particularly chaotic couple of seasons while he was there.
No sooner had Sancho agreed to become United’s star attacking signing of 2021 than Ed Woodward had the brainwave of signing Cristiano Ronaldo.
It was clear that whatever United had been telling Sancho about how he would fit into their team was nonsense, that all technical and tactical considerations had been forgotten the second Woodward had the chance to associate himself with Ronaldo’s sheer star power. Anyone would have been excused some misgivings in the circumstances.
But that was 2½ half years ago. The problem for Sancho is that he has hardly played a single good game since. He’s had three managers in that time – four if you include Gareth Southgate, who hasn’t used him for England since 2021 – and his performances were a bitter disappointment to all of them.
Ole Gunnar-Solskjaer, ever the diplomat, offered Sancho another excuse in an interview with the Athletic: “He’s immensely talented and we haven’t seen the best of him. I hope we do, but he prefers to play left wing . . . where Marcus plays.”
Maybe United just had not found the best position for him.
Actually Sancho played on the left wing plenty of times at Manchester United, it’s just that nobody can remember any of his performances.
He featured on the left wing 22 times in 38 matches in his first season, producing two goals and two assists – adding another three goals and one assist in the remaining 18 appearances in other positions.
He played on the left wing 24 times in 41 matches in his second season, for four goals and two assists, with three goals and one assist from 17 matches in other positions. Maybe Sancho does prefer playing on the left, but it’s hard for anyone else to see a meaningful difference.
This season’s ludicrous stand-off with Ten Hag has damaged the reputation of player, coach and club. Did United do enough to help Sancho settle in? Might Ten Hag have got more out of him with a subtler interpersonal approach? Is the problem that Sancho, when you get down to it, lacks hunger and passion for the game?
Maybe you don’t have to look for psychological explanations when the truth is staring you in the face.
The reality is that Sancho is not athletically cut out to play Premier League football. He might have been able to do it a couple of decades ago, but not today.
He reminds you of another failed big-club signing of days gone by: El Hadji Diouf. As Jamie Carragher wrote of his first training session with Gerard Houllier’s new superstar signing back: “I returned home . . . in a state of depression. The first concern I had with Diouf was his pace. He didn’t have any.”
Can you think of any successful Premier League wingers who are as slow as Sancho? There are one or two, but they all have other qualities that make up for a lack of raw speed.
Dejan Kulusevski at Tottenham is not lightning quick, but he compensates for it by being extremely powerful. Jack Grealish likewise is very hard to knock off the ball.
Bernardo Silva might be even slower than Sancho, but his incomparable intelligence and intensity would make him an automatic pick for any team in the league.
Maybe the only other candidate at a top Premier League club is Sancho’s United team-mate Antony – who is failing for some of the same reasons as Sancho.
Sancho can get away with being slow in Germany because he comes up against a lot of ordinary players he can easily fool. Emir Karic, the Darmstadt left-back he outwitted on Saturday, earns about €3,000 a week – or less than 1% of Sancho’s salary at Manchester United.
That’s the kind of pay differential you often saw between Robbie Keane and his markers when he was terrorising MLS defences towards the end of his career. There aren’t any of those defenders left in the Premier League.
If the most important thing for Sancho is to “play football with a smile on my face, get assists, score goals”, as he says – then he needs to figure out a way to stay in Germany.
