If Chelsea eventually decide Sancho is not for them, it would give United a tricky problem to solve.
In one sense, he would be starting with a clean slate. Sancho’s issues at Old Trafford were with Erik ten Hag.
He refused to buckle and offer the Dutchman the apology after accusing his boss of scapegoating him with damning criticism over his performances in training. The Dutchman cited it as the reason Sancho was not involved in the Premier League game at Arsenal on 3 September 2023.
It was the second time Ten Hag had clashed with Sancho over his performances. In October 2022, he sent Sancho on a personal training programme for three months after detecting a dip in performance he felt was a legacy of the player being left out of an England squad the previous month.
“If you’re from the streets, no one wants to apologise,” former United forwards’ coach Benni McCarthy told a South African radio station last May.
“By doing that, you admit you are not training well, you are lazy, everything you are accused of. Jadon wasn’t going to have that. The manager has a strong character and just said all he wants is an apology. Jadon thought he had done nothing wrong.
“He didn’t see why he had to apologise. Sometimes you have to apologise, because a player will never win against a manager. I spoke to Jadon as a coach, as a mentor, as a friend, and as someone who grew up on the streets and knows the code. But Jadon just wasn’t seeing it.”
Sancho has never had a training session under Ten Hag’s replacement Ruben Amorim.
Yet even without Sancho, Amorim inherited a squad with too many wide attacking players. The former Sporting boss was neutral when he made his only public utterances on the player last month.
“I’m just focused on my players and my problems,” he said. “Sancho is not my problem. We need to win games and then we will see next season.”
Amorim had been asked about him because Sancho had responded to Marcus Rashford’s loan move to Aston Villa by commenting “freedom” on one of the striker’s Instagram posts, in relation to his former team-mate’s own issues at Old Trafford.
It was not a response likely to trigger a sympathetic reaction from club insiders.
The really important people at United do not seem to view Sancho in a positive light anyway given, in addition to his comments on salary, Ratcliffe also told BBC Sport “we are paying £17m to buy him in the summer”, which relates to the fee still outstanding to Borussia Dortmund from the initial transfer in 2021.
Given his contract expires at the end of next season, United know a Sancho return either needs an immediate summer sale or they must make a huge decision over whether to trigger the additional year on a contract that currently runs to 2026, when he could leave for nothing as a free agent.
“Overpaid and not good enough,” was Ratcliffe’s sweeping generalisation of a number of United players earlier this month. Few would dispute that.
The difficulty is getting rid of them without incurring even more financial pain.
United thought Sancho’s move to Chelsea had done that. They may have been mistaken.
