Who killed Sancho’s United career? The club? Ten Hag? Or maybe just football

Never go back. Don’t do it. Never, ever, ever go back. On the other hand, well, you could just go back. Particularly when the business of going away is panning out quite as badly as this. Here’s a good new way to mark the chill passing of time as the lights come on at four and the rain drills against your window.

It is now two and half years since Jadon Sancho moved to Manchester United. United have had three managers in that time. Sancho has earned £40m. And yet he still barely seems to have pulled on the shirt, or got past his moody online announcement clip. This timeline has simply stalled. Wait. Can we restart this thing?

Related: Ratcliffe plans to stand by Ten Hag as he starts Manchester United deep dive

The news that Sancho will be loaned back to Borussia Dortmund as soon as a deal can be hatched should at least bring this strange, dislocating interlude to a close. Although not with any actual resolution, more a sense of something deeply odd having just taken place, a failure that sits outside the regular rules of outrage and reckoning-up.

There is nothing new in this story, except perhaps its extremity. Talented footballer moves to Massive Club and doesn’t just fail to make an impact but never even comes close to existing on the same earthly plane. The contrast of style and outcome is striking in itself. At his best Sancho is all grace, light and easy balance. There is a goal against Köln on his Bundesliga reel where the ball trickles along in front of him and he doesn’t even pretend to touch it, just feints to move three times, making the defender in front of him literally fall over backwards through sheer balletic misdirection.

The best players can make the day stop like this, make the game seem absurd. Why marking? Why corner flags? Why not just do this instead? Sancho has that quality. But not in Manchester, where he has instead seemed to be operating under the heaviest gravity, a character from another movie altogether.

This is the real oddity. Most sporting failures have a pattern. Here we have a story that should be crying out for generic finger-pointing, a clear allocation of blame, a thunderously censorious newspaper column. In reality it feels shapeless and uncooperative, a fault in the way things should work.

We must still try, of course. Crank up the motors. Let’s blame-rinse this thing. For the columnist it should be a classic case of Find The Villain. We have wasted money and wasted talent. The standard approach is to treat this scenario like a crime scene, entering with a twirl of the cane, pointing to the villain without the slightest hesitation, and from there machine-gunning that sorry specimen with 800 words of righteous justice.

Who have we got in the lineup? The most obvious villain is Sancho himself. There are some hot, fat notes to hit here. The shirt proved too heavy. Sancho failed to recognise his own privilege, the precarious nature of talent. But then modern youth is feckless, fragile, over-pandered to. Plus of course we have an opportunity to swipe at the Bundesliga, to become brave and husky and tearful at the Arthurian magnificence of Manchester United, at the righteous authenticity of certain old things I used to feel more comfortable with.

Sancho as the villain will be done. It works. But somehow it doesn’t quite feel right. In which case it might be best to switch to the other main line: Sancho as hero and victim, football as the villain. This is another pre-packed response, a way of demonstrating certain more liberal sympathies, a progressive view of the power dynamic, of getting people to say “This” over a downward-pointing finger emoji on X.

There is merit in it. Here we have a sensitive young man exposed to the open reactor core. Sancho had never actually played a club game in England before he came back. He arrived in the post-Covid lull of 2021, our summer of arse-cheek rocket launches, and was shunted straight into the Solskjær-Rangnick-Ten-Hag non sequitur and told to save this thing.

He shouldn’t have complained about his manager on social media. He should have apologised, both for his own good and because the weekly wage reflects such difficulties. But he is also in an irrational place at a notably feverish time. Player as victim. Football as the killer. Again, it will be done. But it still doesn’t quite feel enough.

There is a chance to get more specific. How about Erik ten Hag as the villain? There is traction here. Bald, censorious man with the air of a rain-sodden 19th-century frontier preacher shatters young English talent. Perhaps you’re one of those who come to this pre-enraged at Ten Hag because of a parasocial relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo, who still seems entirely real and vivid even though he’s essentially a lighted blob on a screen, a set of cheekbones, a feeling of trapped desire. Blame Erik. Tuck in. It works to a point.

Plus we have the broader entry point of all of Manchester United as the villain. Welcome to the meat grinder, the vampire’s castle, a place that will take your talented youth and suck it dry.

Compare Sancho’s treatment at Dortmund, where Edin Terzic instructed his coaches to track him constantly, to swaddle his asset in care and detail. Manchester United as the main villain. It works. You can go with it and feel righteous, an arbiter of good and evil, the saved and the drowned.

And yet somehow this isn’t quite the whole truth either. Because at this point it is necessary to turn to the room, reach for your pocket Derringer, and conclude that what we have here is a Murder on the Orient Express situation, a mass allocation of blame, a situation where everyone comes out of this story looking frazzled, compromised and cloaked in blame.

Albeit, in a way that feels scaled back. The basic idea of what failure and success amounts to has dissolved slightly. Football can be a cruel place in its new guise of a networked 24-hour entertainment industry. Even Dortmund the good guys are basically traders in human commodities. Aged 19 Sancho had played more games than Wayne Rooney at the same age. He was horribly and very publicly abused after Euro 2020 (and hasn’t been the same player since).

What is the hardest part of the elite level now? Succeeding on the pitch? Or keeping your chin above the waters? Sancho is still out there, a functioning avatar in this world (there are literally hundreds of lovingly tended Jadon Sancho social media pages: the brand is strong).

Perhaps ducking out now and then is going to happen a little more, a necessary step towards keeping a little piece of your soul intact. All that is really missing here is the spectacle, moments of chiaroscuro under the lights where the rest of it falls away and all that matters is talent, teams and the game. Forget blame and failure, the classical scales of justice. The only real question here is whether Sancho can find that again.