After four record-breaking seasons at Dortmund, Sancho was snapped up by Manchester United (then managed by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) in July 2021. It was a massive fee of 85million euros (£73m) and a massive five-year contract (£13m a year) - but things soon went badly wrong.

Current Man Utd boss Erik ten Hag says “he had issues all the way through” with Sancho, who has been training and eating with United's academy players since falling out with the Dutchman last September.

Now Sancho, still only 23, has been sent back to Germany, signing a loan contract with Dortmund until the end of the season.

He says it “felt like coming home” and is looking forward to “playing with a smile on my face again” - and he didn’t take long to show his value on and off the pitch.

In his first game back, he managed an assist off the bench during Dortmund's 3-0 win at Darmstadt 98. Meanwhile, the club sold more than 5,000 replica Sancho shirts within the first few days of his return.

Here, Vodacom Soccer assesses whether Sancho’s return to Dortmund will be the start of a resurgence for the young Englishman.

Why Sancho was so good at Dortmund

Sancho spent four seasons at Dortmund, playing 137 matches and contributing 50 goals and 64 assists. He mainly played on the left in Germany.

In the 2018/19 season, his 14 assists won him the playmaker award in the Bundesliga - then amazingly, he did even better the following season, scoring 17 goals and assisting 16 goals while still a teenager for most of it.

Known for their fast-passing attacking football, Dortmund's style suited Sancho down to a tee. Allowed to stay forward while his team were defending, Sancho ranked third in the league for big chances created in 2019/20 with 19, and eighth for successful dribbles with three per game.

This was his best season to date and cemented his status as a world talent.

Sancho was key to Dortmund's build-up play, the focal point of an attack that also featured Erling Haaland and (in his final season) Jude Bellingham.

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Why Sancho was so bad at United

The first glaring issue for Sancho when he joined United was that they signed him to fill in on the right side, when he has always been more comfortable coming in off the left.

The trouble was, United already had Sancho’s England team-mate, Marcus Rashford, playing there. In addition, United were very much a counter-attacking team under Solskjaer and have largely remained that way under Ten Hag.

Sancho thrives more with plenty of touches of the ball where he can control the play. United needed an explosive winger, where Sancho is more of a creator. As a result, he only managed 12 goals and six assists in 82 games during his two-and-a-half-year stay at Old Trafford.

Ten Hag was never Sancho’s biggest fan, but the writing was on the wall when the United manager said "on his performance in training, we didn't select him”, after Sancho was left out of the squad for their 3-1 defeat to Arsenal last September.

Sancho hit back on social media, saying it was “completely untrue” - but he never played another minute for United.

What the future holds for Sancho

Perhaps the key to Sancho’s future is the way he is managed off as well as on the pitch. Already there are clues to how Dortmund will treat him differently.

Shortly after he returned, the club’s CEO, Hans-Joachim Watzke, was quoted as saying: "Jadon only has one problem, he's late from time to time. His internal clock is not so well-developed. He's a very nice boy, but every now and then he's late. But you have to accept that.”

Judging by this, Dortmund clearly have a better understanding of Sancho than old-school Ten Hag ever did. Also, they have given him the number 10 straight away, a shirt normally worn by the key player in the team (think Messi and Maradona), which should help Sancho’s confidence on the pitch.

Despite his lack of recent gametime, Dortmund manager Edin Terzic is relaxed about his fitness, saying that Sancho’s “stats are outstanding". There are reports that Terzic may play Sancho up front alongside Dortmund’s latest young sensation, Youssoufa Moukoko.

However well Sancho does over the rest of this season, it looks unlikely he has a future at United - but plenty of other European clubs will surely want him, even if the fast pace of the Premier League may not be best suited to his talents.

Right now, Sancho’s biggest aim will be to get back on Gareth Southgate’s radar in time for the European Championships this summer - which are, of course, being played in Germany.

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