Last week at St George’s Park, when England manager Gareth Southgate was discussing his squad selection for the European Championship this summer, someone asked him if he had spoken to Jadon Sancho about not being part of the group.
It provoked a flicker of surprise, virtually imperceptible, as if Southgate had not expected the question. Oh yeah, him. The reaction was both entirely expected, given Sancho’s long international absence, and deeply telling given that he missed a penalty in England’s last European Championship match.
Wembley has become the pulpit of Sancho’s fluctuating career to date. It was there where he started his first England game, at 18, and where the campaign grew for him to be a starter at Euro 2020 after he scored against Ireland, when Manchester United too were making clear their intention to bring him back to England.
A year ago this week, Sancho and United both appeared at England’s national stadium to face Manchester City and played in a major final. Run it again, only this time we’re doing it in instalments a week apart. From starting the FA Cup final, his last in a United shirt, to starting the Champions League final in the space of 12 months. Nothing about this makes much sense.
Watching the FA Cup final with Sancho might just have been the only thing more exciting than watching it at Wembley. A Manchester United right winger scores one goal and helps to create another and he’s only 19. At 24, Sancho is thus still young and suddenly yesterday’s man.
And yet his only present commitment is preparing for the biggest game of his life and the biggest game in club football. It’s all a little *record scratch* *freeze frame* “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
A cavernous gap exists between his two spells – Sancho & Dortmund: You’re Gonna Hear Me Ruhr and Sancho & Dortmund 2: Judgement Day. Then, Sancho was the leader of an entire movement, a young winger who had grasped the nettle and taken control of his own future. He was the boy wonder. That pathway from English football to Westphalia inspired Jude Bellingham to do the same and we all know what happened next.
This time, restoration and redemption. Sancho left Borussia Dortmund with goodwill and best wishes, but he would have hoped never to have needed to return when his trajectory faced upward to the moon. Nobody here would want him to place his tail between his legs, but that’s how it felt anyway. Grass wasn’t greener eh, kid – there is still a place for you.
Who is most to blame is a messy, unedifying argument of which there is little to be gained from thrashing your way to the bottom. Certainly the conditions were not ideal: Sancho played under four different managers, in four different positions, in a team that had the most options in his favourite role and at a club that was going through an existential ownership crisis.
Nor can Sancho ignore all of those opportunities that came and went. United never saw his peak and, if the style or the substance or the situation were not to his liking, he never seemed able to make the best of it. Six assists in 82 games is a pitiful return for someone of his evident creative potential. Maybe German football just works better?
For if the framing is starkly different, the effect of being here is the same. Both times, Sancho headed to Germany because something had broken and he was in search of a fix, within himself and within the environment he found. First it was experience, then convalescence. Both times, it seems to have worked out beautifully.
Dortmund’s yellow wall is regularly held up as the Mecca of football spectatorship, a pilgrimage after which your soul for the sport will be recuperated. For Sancho, that has happened on the pitch in front of it. He came alive in this team and has been reborn in it, albeit slowly after the bruises of life at United. There is an emotional muscle memory for him in this shirt. Few get the chance to turn back time and it has afforded Sancho a career reboot.
Whatever your club allegiance, this should be considered a cause for celebration. You can criticise Sancho for picking the wrong club at the wrong time and getting it wrong when he got there. You can lambast a young kid for being late to training and for allowing a familiar city to offer similar distractions.
But ultimately, what’s the point? Given a choice between a talented footballer being happy and being discontented, only a fool or a bully would pick the latter.
What happens next is dependent upon a number of moving parts, not least what United decide to do with a manager whose relationship with Sancho is evidently broken beyond repair. You do not loan out a £73m signing at the age of 23 unless something has gone seriously wrong. Erik ten Hag’s potential replacement may see easy value in a rekindling.
That only makes Saturday more intriguing, for it exists as an island. It doesn’t matter what came before, the slings and arrows and social media huffs. It doesn’t matter what will come next, whether it be in this country or Germany on a permanent basis. For now there is only the final and only Dortmund matters. For now, Wembley is ready to host the next big event of Sancho’s career.
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