The sadness in the Jadon Sancho story is that he has succumbed to the very thing he warned against.
As a fresh-faced teenager, Sancho sat down for an interview on Borussia Dortmund’s YouTube channel in which he showed maturity beyond his years by highlighting the pitfalls of being a young superstar.
‘I’ve seen a lot of young talents disappear because it’s come too early and it’s got to their heads,’ he said in that 2019 chat, which now looks prophetic as he trains at an amateur football club as the most high-profile free agent in the game today.
‘My family have seen this. Luckily enough I’ve got great people around me to keep me grounded and humble and they tell me what I’m doing is not enough.’
People have a lot to say when it comes to Sancho. There are certainly a great many people on social media who take pleasure in goading, mocking and ridiculing him at every turn. Each and every indiscretion is, weirdly, celebrated.
Others, who have worked with him and insist the bad-boy public perception is far detached from the quiet, introverted reality, are pained by how the past eight years have played out.
Jadon Sancho (pictured with Flixton boss Alex Mortimer) has been using the 10th-tier side’s facilities in Manchester
It’s a sign of the times for former wonderkid Sancho, who left Man United in the summer after a disappointing five years at the club
The fact Flixton FC, a 10th-division team in Greater Manchester, felt it necessary to qualify that no, they had not taken Sancho on trial in recent days, underlined the absurdity of a career that once promised so much, but has now taken too many wrong turns.
‘To clarify, Jadon was not on trial with the club and was not involved in any transfer discussions,’ Flixton posted on Instagram.
‘He simply used our facilities for a private training session to maintain his fitness while preparing for the next chapter of his career.’
There are agreements in principle, we’re told, with a number of clubs across Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, while clubs in Europe, with Turkey one potential landing spot, also paying close attention. It is Sancho who is taking his time to choose his next destination.
But the days of Real Madrid, of Paris Saint-Germain, and the game’s elite fighting among themselves to catch Sancho’s eye are long gone. For that fresh-faced teenager that had the world at his feet, it really wasn’t meant to go like this.
During Sancho’s first spell at Borussia Dortmund, the club he joined after turning his back on Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, it felt like his potential was limitless.
‘An 18-year-old scaring the life out of seasoned Premier League players. I love it,’ Rio Ferdinand, then working as a pundit for BT Sport, gushed after a game against Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley. ‘I think he’ll be the best English player in the coming years.’
Nobody was mocking Sancho or Ferdinand back then. It was not absurd to see the teenage winger as a potential Ballon d’Or winner.
But there were also the first signs of problems ahead. First when Sancho was dropped and fined for returning late from England duty ahead of a match against Borussia Monchengladbach in October 2019.
A fortnight later he was hooked after 36 minutes against Bayern Munich by boss Lucien Favre, who later said it was because Sancho was ‘not good enough’. Privately, Sancho and his camp felt he was being hung out to dry.
Sancho and his camp felt hung out to dry after then Borussia Dortmund boss Lucien Favre hooked him after 36 minutes of a game against Bayern Munich
Figures in Germany have remained fiercely defensive of Sancho but time-keeping became an area of concern.
In 2018, Phil Foden and Sancho were dropped for an England Under 19s win over Latvia after turning up late to a training session.
Nemanja Matic, a former team-mate of Sancho’s at Manchester United, named and shamed him as a time-keeping offender three years ago.
‘Among the players who would always be late were Paul Pogba and Jadon Sancho,’ Matic told Austrian media outlet YU Planet. ‘The rest of us who were always on time were angry, so we decided to form a kind of internal disciplinary committee with me serving as its president.
‘I put a sheet of paper up on the wall where I documented the names of individuals arriving late. During one particular season we collected around £75,000 in fines.’
Sancho’s time-keeping issues are said to have been ironed out in recent years. But back to the early days at Dortmund, when he was a young, dazzling talent with the world’s biggest clubs queueing up to get him.
Manchester United pursued him relentlessly for two years as their great hope for their troubled right wing position before finally sealing a £73million move.
‘I always knew that I would return to England one day,’ said Sancho, who signed a five-year deal at Old Trafford at the age of 21. ‘The chance to join Manchester United is a dream come true and I just cannot wait to perform in the Premier League.’
Sancho described his move to United as a ‘dream come true’ – but in reality it was a nightmare
Only what followed was not a dream, but a nightmare. A nightmare that started when he was hospitalised with an ear infection; then saw Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the man who signed him and planned to build around him, sacked before Sancho had even scored.
Soon a no-nonsense disciplinarian in Erik ten Hag was calling him out publicly before sending him into exile, where he no longer had access to the first team canteen and was eating out a plastic container and training with academy players.
Then came a loan spell at Chelsea that saw the Blues pay a £5million penalty fee to avoid signing him permanently, another loan at Aston Villa that saw Villa pass up on a permanent move as they instead signed Alejandro Garnacho, and the end of his United career as he walked away for nothing.
We will never truly know how things would have gone had Sancho and Ten Hag never crossed paths.
Those inside United speak of a complete mismatch of personalities. Sancho is an introverted character – Daily Mail Sport spoke to him in Dortmund following a man-of-the-match performance against PSV Eindhoven where he was polite, cordial and a far cry from the problem child some desperately want him to be.
With that introversion comes a need for an arm-round-the-shoulder manager, rather than the coolness with which Ten Hag operated. An argument can be made that Ten Hag was the worst type of manager for Sancho and Sancho the worst type of player for Ten Hag.
Sancho made 41 appearances in his first full season under Ten Hag before he took time away from the first team in December 2022 after his manager cited ‘physical and mental’ factors, a move which privately was not welcomed by those close to the player. Pointing to mental health was clumsy from the manager.
By way of reparations, Ten Hag had arranged for Sancho, during a three-month break away from United, to train at the home of Dutch amateur side OJC Rosmalen, where three coaches, picked out by Ten Hag due to specialising in mental health, technical training and fitness, worked to restore Sancho to peak performance.
But then came the rift that Sancho’s career has, truthfully, never fully recovered from.
Former United boss Erik ten Hag (right) was a terrible personality match with Sancho
In September 2023, Ten Hag omitted Sancho from a 3-1 defeat at Arsenal due to, in his opinion, a lack of effort in training.
‘On his performance in training, we didn’t select him,’ Ten Hag said afterwards. ‘You have to reach the level every day at Manchester United.’
It was typically blunt from Ten Hag but nothing that he hadn’t communicated privately. Sancho disagreed that his effort, having been tasked with acting as an ‘Arsenal’ player in training alongside his fellow team-mates outside of Ten Hag’s starting XI, was any worse than that of his peers.
So, with the help of those around him, Sancho hit post on an infamous, but now-deleted, social media jab at his manager. His Manchester United career would never be the same again.
‘Please don’t believe everything you read,’ the statement read. ‘I will not allow people saying things that is (sic) completely untrue, I have conducted myself very well in training this week. I believe there are other reasons for this matter that I won’t go into, I’ve been a scapegoat for a long time which isn’t fair!’
Ten Hag was furious and figures at United found themselves caught in the crossfire of trying to repair a relationship that many, including players, desperately wanted to see resolved.
Ten Hag demanded an apology that never came. On Sancho’s side, there was a feeling that he was being singled out where others were never handed the same punishment.
So he trained alone with academy players, many of whom, off the record, praised his personality and candour, while he was not allowed into senior facilities. He got changed alone, and ate out of black lunch-boxes as he wasn’t allowed into the first team canteen. It was unprecedented treatment that will never be seen again having since been outlawed by FIFA and FIFPro.
It’s only two years since Sancho was playing in a Champions League final at Wembley for Borussia Dortmund
By the time he was back at United with Amorim in the hotseat, the ‘bomb squad’ had more members in it and Sancho and Co were restricted to turning up after 5pm when the first team had gone home. It was all manufactured to maximise humiliation.
At Chelsea, which followed a second loan spell at Dortmund where he was lauded as a homecoming hero, Sancho was a popular figure.
He was back home in London, settled into the dressing room, and had a major ally in Blues recruitment chief Joe Shields, who vouched for Sancho’s character after working with him at Manchester City.
A key part of the pitch from then Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca was about platforming Sancho’s game in Maresca’s wing-dominant system, which was reliant on wide players winning their one-v-one battles.
While that would later become a bone of contention – Maresca found Sancho’s output frustrating in the one-v-one department – Chelsea sources remain insistent that they were still working to acquire him permanently.
He scored as Chelsea beat Real Betis in the Conference League final, and while the loan wasn’t flawless – some Chelsea sources recalled how Sancho would, on occasion, complain about team-mates not passing him the ball – it felt a good fit for club and player.
Chelsea and Sancho seemed a good fit during his loan there in 2024-25 – but the Blues opted against signing him permanently
Chelsea were covering around half of his £250,000-a-week wages during the loan but when it came to a permanent arrangement, they were seeking a drastically reduced salary, which saw the move break down and the Blues enact a £5million penalty clause to escape their £25million obligation to buy.
Then came the next roll of the dice, the late loan swoop from Aston Villa in a regrettable transfer window that would go on to cost Monchi, their then sporting director, his job in the Midlands.
Sancho was never Unai Emery’s go-to man and while the Spaniard did warm to Sancho towards the end – he loves rejuvenating high-calibre players – it always remained a remote prospect that this would be anything more than a temporary arrangement.
Insiders insist there were no issues with his attitude or performance in training, and Sancho didn’t allow his career to be derailed by a humiliating substitution after coming off the bench against Manchester City in October 2025.
Time-keeping was no longer the issue with Sancho. Now criticism came on his ability to change a game. Since signing for United, Sancho, who has never shown blistering pace, hasn’t hit 10 goals and assists in a single league season. A staggering statistic for a player who scored 50 goals and managed 64 assists in 137 games across four seasons in Germany.
At 20, Sancho was the ‘best young player on the planet bar none,’ Ferdinand claimed, and many other pundits were ready to back that up.
At 26, Sancho has played for Manchester United, Chelsea and Aston Villa, gone back to Borussia Dortmund, and is now weighing up what the future holds, and whether that future is to be played out in the Middle East.
There will be finger-pointing on all sides and the blame-game, in truth, should be split across the board. There should be no joy in the Sancho story, only sadness. It wasn’t meant to go like this.
