Never go back. Do not do it. Never, ever go back. Then again, you could just go back. Especially when leaving turns out as bad as this. Here’s a good new way to mark the cold passage of time, as the lights come on at four o’clock and the rain pounds against your window.
It has now been two and a half years since Jadon Sancho moved to Manchester United. United have had three managers in that time. Sancho has earned £40 million. And yet it seems he’s still barely put on his shirt or gotten past his moody online announcement clip. This timeline has simply come to a standstill. To wait. Can we restart this thing?
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The news that Sancho will be loaned to Borussia Dortmund as soon as a deal can be done should at least put an end to this strange, disruptive interlude. Although not with an actual solution, more with the feeling that something very strange has just taken place, a failure that falls outside the regular rules of outrage and reckoning.
There is nothing new in this story, except perhaps the extremes of it. Talented footballer moves to Massive Club and not only fails to impress, but doesn’t even come close to living on the same earthly plane. The contrast between style and result is striking in itself. At his best, Sancho is all grace, light and easy poise. There’s a goal against Köln on his Bundesliga reel where the ball trickles past him and he doesn’t even pretend to touch it, but only pretends to move three times, causing the defender in front of him to literally fall backwards due to the steep slope. balletic deception.
The best players can stop the day, make the game seem absurd. Why mark? Why corner flags? Why don’t you just do this? Sancho has that quality. But not in Manchester, where instead he seemed to be operating under the harshest gravity, a character from another film.
This is the real oddity. Most sporting failures have a pattern. Here we have a story that should cry out for general finger-pointing, a clear attribution of blame, a thunderous censure in the newspaper. In reality, it feels formless and uncooperative, a flaw in the way things are supposed to work.
Of course, we still have to try. Start the engines. Let’s blame this thing. For the columnist, it should be a classic case of Find The Villain. We have wasted money and talent. The standard approach is to treat this scenario like a crime scene, enter with a twist of the stick, point at the bad guy without the slightest hesitation, and from there blast that sorry specimen with 800 words of righteous justice.
Who do we have in the line-up? The most obvious villain is Sancho himself. There are some hot, bold notes to hit here. The shirt turned out to be too heavy. Sancho failed to recognize his own privilege, the precarious nature of talent. But then modern youth is worthless, vulnerable and indulged too much. Moreover, of course, we have the chance to beat the Bundesliga, to become brave, hoarse and tearful at the Arthurian splendor of Manchester United, at the righteous authenticity of certain old things that I used to feel more comfortable with.
Sancho as the villain will be ready. It functions. But somehow it doesn’t feel quite right. In that case it might be best to switch to the other main line: Sancho as hero and victim, football as villain. This is another off-the-cuff response, a way to show certain more liberal sympathies, a progressive take on power dynamics, to get people to say “This” about a downward-pointing finger emoji on X.
There is merit in it. Here we have a sensitive young man exposed to the open reactor core. Sancho had never played a club match in England before returning. He arrived in the post-Covid lull of 2021, our summer of donkey-cheeked rocket launches, and was shunted non sequitur straight into the Solskjær-Rangnick-Ten-Hag and told to save this thing.
He shouldn’t have complained about his manager on social media. He should have apologized, both for his own good and because the weekly wage reflects such hardship. But he’s also in an irrational place at a remarkably feverish time. Player as victim. Football as the killer. Again, it will be done. But it still doesn’t feel like enough.
There’s an opportunity to get more specific. What about Erik ten Hag as the villain? There’s an appetite here. A bald, censorious man with the air of a rain-soaked 19th-century frontier preacher crushes young English talent. Maybe you’re one of those coming to this pre-rage on Ten Hag because of a parasocial relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo, who still seems completely real and alive even though he’s essentially a lit blob on a screen, a bunch of cheekbones, a feeling of trapped longing. Blame Erik. Stop in. It works to a certain extent.
Moreover, we have the wider access point of all of Manchester United as the villain. Welcome to the meat grinder, the vampire castle, a place where your talented youth is sucked away.
Compare Sancho’s treatment in Dortmund, where Edin Terzic instructed his coaches to keep a constant eye on him and wrap his asset with care and detail. Manchester United as the main villain. It functions. You can go along with it and feel righteous, an arbiter of good and evil, the saved and the drowned.
And yet somehow this is not quite the whole truth. Because at this point it is necessary to turn to the room, reach for your Derringer in your pocket and conclude that what we have here is a murder on the Orient Express situation, a massive attribution of blame, a situation in which everyone comes from this story. looks exhausted, compromised and shrouded in guilt.
Albeit in a way that feels scaled back. The basic idea of what constitutes failure and success has been somewhat resolved. Football can be a cruel place in its new guise as a networked 24-hour entertainment industry. Even Dortmund the good guys are actually traders in human goods. At 19, Sancho had played more games than Wayne Rooney at the same age. He was horribly and publicly abused after Euro 2020 (and hasn’t been the same player since).
So what’s the hardest part of the elite level? Success on the field? Or keep your chin above water? Sancho still exists, a functioning avatar in this world (there are literally hundreds of lovingly maintained Jadon Sancho social media pages: the brand is strong).
Maybe it will happen a little more every now and then, a necessary step to keep a little piece of your soul intact. The only thing really missing here is the spectacle, moments of chiaroscuro under the lights where everything else falls away and all that matters is talent, teams and the game. Forget guilt and failure, the classic scale of justice. The only real question here is whether Sancho can still find that.