With addition of Jadon Sancho, Man United appear a scarier sight

Jadon Sancho (right) is with Team England at the European Championships. (Photo by Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

Now that Manchester United have paid the remarkable sum of €85m for midfielder/winger Jadon Sancho, the English national will be returning to the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future. While Sancho will be going to the north of England, he will be welcomed like a son and the expectations will be as high as they might be on one of their own.

There will be many places Sancho can be used on the pitch – out wide to provide service and runs to the inside or from a more central position from which he can help to narrate the match and feed the likes of Edinson Cavani, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial.

Wherever he should end up playing, it is likely that with the proper motivation he will make a tremendous impact for his new club and help them challenge for silverware across England and Europe.

Jadon Sancho is too good to remain out of Premier League

While the 21-year-old has won trophies at Borussia Dortmund, playing alongside some world class youth and veteran talent along the way, it has long been figured he would eventually be purchased by Manchester United. While the fee has always been in question, there was never a doubt as to whether the Red Devils would pony up the funds to pay it; some things are not rocket science.

United desire more firepower and more decisive options as they have to fight off the likes of Manchester City who just keep winning Premier League crowns,  as well as Chelsea, who beat City multiple times, three to be exact, last season and who will be a threat with Thomas Tuchel staying in London himself.

Liverpool will be a better side as well via the transfer window plus the return of injured players like Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez, while Leicester City will have to bounce back once again from a heartbreaking final day of the Premier League campaign, where they lost a Champions League spot for the second year running.

These teams, as well as others like Tottenham, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Everton and surely more, will ask many questions of both Sancho and his new team, and his play will demonstrate how much being at Old Trafford means to him. The Premier League is widely regarded as one of the hardest slogs in the entire world, and so if Sancho can show good form in a consistent manner here, there will be little doubt about his skill and potential moving forward.

If I were Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, I would ask him to play inside more, alongside or a bit in front of Paul Pogba and next to Bruno Fernandes. Those three working with the front three might be a difficult combination to defend in the box and could ask serious questions of even the staunchest defenses in European football.

Yet it might be that Sancho is destined to float, to play as a winger at some points, and as an attacking midfielder at other times. If the player is comfortable with this and can understand his varied roles in each location, then I shouldn’t have an issue with it. However, if it compromises his ability to really get going as a player, then something will have to be done definitively to give him the sort of comfort he needs.

For Manchester United it was a steal of a deal, as it is understood that Sancho will likely blossom alongside better talent and against higher grade competition. This is to say nothing against Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig, or any other Bundesliga club, but merely an appraisal of European leagues from top to bottom; the Premier League is, from top to bottom, a tougher league than the Bundesliga.

And so as the season creeps ever closer with still plenty of time to execute transfers and the like, United already have Jadon Sancho. With players to sell and others in their sights, might they have a massive window?

For the rest of the clubs in England however, a massive window for United will certainly be the last thing they will have wanted during this summer.

Such is life; yet while this looks like a winning innovation on paper, there are still matches to be played in the future and no one has won any trophies since the deal was struck. United and Sancho will want to change this as soon as possible however, and may just get their wish should they get the Jadon Sancho they have seen highlights of and not the one who sits on the bench for Gareth Southgate with England.

• Published on 06/30/2021 at 4:13 PM EST
• Last updated on 06/30/2021 at 4:13 PM EST