by Don’t go back. Don’t do it. Never, ever, ever go back. On the other hand, well, you could go straight back. Especially when the event business is going down as badly as this. Here’s a good new way to mark the cold passing of time as the lights come on and the rain drills against the window.
It is now two and a half years since Jadon Sancho moved to Manchester United. United had three managers at that time. Sancho has earned £40m. And yet he’s barely pulled the shirt on, or managed to get his clip advertised online. This timeline has stopped. Wait. Can we restart this thing?
Related: Ratcliffe plans to stand by Ten Hag as he begins Manchester United’s deep dive
The news that Sancho will be brought back to Borussia Dortmund should end as soon as an agreement can be reached, at least, this strange, dislocation interplay. Although there is no real solution, more a feeling that something very strange has happened, a failure that sits outside the regular rules of betrayal and reckoning.
There is nothing new in this story, except perhaps its ending. The talented footballer moves to the Massive Club and not only fails to make an impact but doesn’t come close to being on the same world plane. The contrast of style and result is remarkable in itself. At his best Sancho is a balance of grace, lightness and ease. There is a goal against Cologne on his Bundesliga reel where the ball is trickling down in front of him and he doesn’t even pretend to touch it, he just seems to move three times, causing the defender in front of him to fall to Literally backwards. ballet misdirection.
The best players can make the day stop like this, make the game look absurd. Why mark? Why corner flags? Why not do this instead? Sancho has that quality. But not in Manchester, where he instead seems to be operating under the heaviest gravity, a character from another film entirely.
This is the strange thing. Most sporting failures have a pattern. Here we have a story that should be lamented over generic keyboarding, a blatant distribution of blame, a well-meaning newspaper column. It really feels shapeless and uncooperative, a flaw in the way things should work.
We still have to try, of course. Crank up the motors. 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 situation like a crime scene, going in with a couple of canes, pointing out the villain without the slightest hesitation, and then machine-gunning that sorry specimen with 800 words of correct justice.
Who do we have in the lineup? The most obvious villain is Sancho himself. There are some hot, fat notes to hit here. The shirt was too heavy. Sancho failed to recognize his own privilege, the impermanent nature of talent. But then the modern youth is restless, fragile, too prayerful. In addition, of course, we have the opportunity to slide at the Bundesliga, to be brave and husky and rush to the Arthurian splendor of Manchester United, to true authenticity certain old things I feel more comfortable with.
Sancho will be the villain to do. It works. But somehow it doesn’t feel right. In that case it might be better to switch to the other main line: Sancho as hero and victim, football as the villain. This is another prepackaged response, a way to express a certain more liberal sympathy, a progressive insight into power dynamics, to encourage people to say “This” over a finger-pointing-X emoji.
There is merit in it. Here a sensitive young man is exposed to the core of the open reactor. Sancho had never played a club game in England before his return. He arrived in the post-Covid lull of 2021, our cheeky rocket launch of the summer, and was sunk straight into the heavenly Solskjær-Rangnick-Ten-Hag improvisation and told to save this thing.
He shouldn’t have complained about his manager on social media. He should have an excuse, for his own sake and because the weekly wages reflect such difficulties. But he is also in an irrational place at a very feverish time. Player as victim. Football as the killer. Again, it will be done. But it still doesn’t feel like enough.
There is a chance to get more specific. How about Erik ten Hag as the villain? There is a draw here. A bald, censorious man with the air of a 19th-century rain frontier preacher destroys England’s young talent. Perhaps you are one of those who come to this pre-anger at Ten Hag because of a parasocial relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo, a person who is still real and alive even though he is a light blob on a screen, a set of cheeks, his sense of desire caught Blame it on Erik. Tuck in. It works to a point.
Plus we have a wider entry point of it Manchester United all as the villain. Welcome to the meat grinder, the vampire’s castle, where your talented youth will catch and drag him dry.
Compare Sancho’s treatment at Dortmund, where Edin Terzic instructed his coaches to constantly track him, swallow his assets with care and detail. Manchester United as the main villain. It works. You can go with him and feel righteous, arbiter of good and bad, the saved and the drowned.
And yet somehow this is not the whole truth either. Because at this point it is necessary to go to the room, touch your pocket Derringer, and conclude that what we have here is a Murder on the Orient Express situation, a mass allocation of blame, a situation where everyone comes out of this story. looking frazzled, in danger and covered in blame.
Although, in a way it feels like it is scaled back. The basic idea of what constitutes failure and success has dissolved somewhat. Football can be a cruel place in its new form of 24-hour networked entertainment industry. Even Dortmund the good guys are essentially traders in human commodities. At the age of 19 Sancho had played more games than Wayne Rooney at the same age. He was horribly publicly abused after Euro 2020 (and hasn’t been the same player since).
What is the hardest part of the elite level now? Are you doing well on the field? Or keep your chin above the waters? Sancho is still out there, a functioning avatar in this world (there are literally hundreds of well-loved Jadon Sancho social media pages: the brand is strong).
Ducking out may happen now and then a little more, a necessary step towards keeping a little piece of your soul safe. What is really missing here are the shows, moments of chiaroscuro under the lights when the rest of it falls and the most important thing is talent, teams and the game. Forget the blame and failure, the classic scales of justice. The only real question here is whether Sancho can find that again.
