How Jadon Sancho became a vital cog in Borussia Dortmund’s yellow machine

Just imagine if Jadon Sancho had stayed at Manchester City. He could have been celebrating at Wembley on Saturday, the first ever domestic treble in English football.

The reality is he probably would have been a bit part player. Burton Albion would have been the only black and yellow he’d have seen this season.

Instead of being a part-time pawn in games like City’s 9-0 Carabao Cup semi-final win, Sancho has played a starring role in the Bundesliga’s most exciting title race in a decade.

In interviews this season for Fox Sports USA with me, Sancho did not explicitly mention City or Guardiola but he has reiterated several times how grateful he is for his chance.

He took his latest one on Saturday, with his 12th league goal of the season igniting Dortmund’s 2-0 win at Borussia Mönchengladbach.

He finished the season too with 18 assists, the most in the division. He was also the only player at Dortmund to be in double figures for goals and assists, which are combined in Germany to make ‘Scorerpunkte’, translating as scorer points. Sancho’s tally of 30 made him the youngest player ever to reach that figure.

The big picture: he’s had a productive season.

Becoming a first-team regular

To become German champions, Sancho and Dortmund needed a Frankfurt favour in Bavaria, to get his hands on the Bundesliga title and stop Bayern. That did not happen though.

The convincing nature of Bayern’s 5-1 thwacking of Frankfurt was similar to the 5-0 tonking Dortmund and Sancho took at the Allianz Arena six weeks ago, in front of England manager Gareth Southgate.

Starting games of that size says more about Sancho’s rapid development in the past 12 months, the only Dortmund player who played in every single Bundesliga game this season, where he became a first-team regular.

The first six league games, the start of new coach Lucien Favre’s tenure at Dortmund, saw Sancho used as a substitute in each game. A goal and five assists in 124 minutes, averaging at out at one goal or assist just over every 20 minutes, left Favre no choice but to start him thereafter.

He started all but two of Dortmund’s remaining 28 Bundesliga games, displacing soon-to-be Chelsea winger Christian Pulisic, and how he shone, whether on the left or (mainly) right flank.

The anti-Klopp

Having Favre as a coach, in some ways the anti-Jürgen Klopp, is a big reason behind his success. Professorial and understated, the 61-year-old Swiss likes his teams to play the ball on the floor, perfect for someone of Sancho’s slight stature. Klopp’s Dortmund used to have a certain wildness to them but for Favre, the way to goal is to be found in what look like carefully choreographed combinations.

A player going it alone though is not seen as selfish by him, far from it. “Whoever can dribble past three players plays for the team,” as Favre said in 2015 to German football magazine 11Freunde, as he talked about football being ‘a mirror of society’.

“Today there’s eight billion people on the planet and little space. We therefore have to find solutions.”

Sancho has been one of them for Dortmund this season and, in a way, of course he has. This is a guy who learned his trade playing in the concrete cages of South London. The ‘street-footballer’ roots, as captain and friend Marco Reus termed it earlier this season, have propelled Sancho to the player he is today.

“To see that guy dribble… you see the defenders shaking in their pants. And I do it in training as well!” as team-mate Thomas Delaney put it to me in December.

Cage football

Watch him live and you’ll see how he picks the right time to dribble or cross, make a run to create space for a team-mate or time a late surge into the box. It is however that ability with his acceleration and deceleration in one-on-one situations against defenders, straight from the cage, that is his most impressive asset because not many can do it, let alone as well as he can.

The final game of the season saw Sancho go up against Thorgan Hazard. The younger brother of Eden, he is supposedly close to moving to Dortmund and had been the player behind Sancho with the second most dribbles in the league this season on 117. Not bad but Sancho had 178, some 61 more and a slightly higher percentage of them completed too.

That ability has allowed Sancho to contribute at key moments in the season, whether it’s setting up injury time goals for Marco Reus or scoring winners in the derby against Schalke, when his Grandmother had passed away only a few days before.

That said, there have been times and phases when Sancho has struggled, both for consistency across the 90 minutes and against certain opponents. Sancho was “a bit off it” in his words against Frankfurt’s Filip Kostic in January. In November against Bayern’s David Alaba, widely regarded as the league’s best left back, he had a difficult first half, before improving in the second.

“It’s been a lot different than last year because obviously I was just coming on here and there,” said Sancho in April. “Sometimes I wasn’t playing. It’s really a big change for me and I’m just getting used to it now.”

Sancho Snr’s influence

Adjusting to life in Germany last season was tougher though. Injury, the club being in crisis and Sancho’s own lax timekeeping leading to a short period where he was banished to the second team were three factors.

SportBild, Germany’s biggest selling weekly football magazine, detailed last week that being late can still be a problem for Sancho every now and again but when his dad, Sean, is about, that doesn’t happen. Sean is seen as down-to-earth, known for cycling into the club’s training base when he’s over from London.

Sancho junior has that about him too. He’s taken to making sure to shake the hands of our camera team before interviews, a small but nice touch.

The challenge for Sancho now is to stay grounded whilst the world around him takes off about how good he is. As the Independent reported last week, a mooted move to Manchester United now looks unlikely this summer. Dortmund can offer Champions League football next season. United cannot.

Does a move to Premier League beckon?

Even if that wasn’t the case, Dortmund remains the right place for Sancho. City and Liverpool’s points tallies do say something for a higher standard at the top of the Premier League than in the Bundesliga.

A move back to England this summer would only raise expectations for a guy who is still only 19. And if next season isn’t as good as this one for him, despite Dortmund’s high standards, they won’t shout or scream. Sometimes, he has Marco Reus there to tell him just to relax a bit. The Bundesliga will continue to afford him a patience that the Premier League does not.

Sancho and Dortmund played a great season, the third best in the club’s history and it still wasn’t enough for the title. Bayern will strengthen over the summer but Sancho is likely to be helping spearhead Dortmund’s title challenge next season.

The fans on the yellow wall can be heard celebrating their €7 million snip, singing his name with increasing regularity, something that doesn’t tend to happen too much with most players in German football. Whilst Manchester City and Pep Guardiola might not care, Jadon Sancho has proven this season that he isn’t like most players.