 Alright, it's time now to talk some football on the Sports Max soon. After three rollercoaster seasons at Old Trafford in the English Premier League, it seems a Bundesliga homecoming is becoming more and more of a likelihood for Manchester United winger Jadon Sancho. Since the beginning of this January transfer window, the 23-year-old has been linked with a lone move to his former club, Borussia Dortmund, after a well-documented falling out with Manchester United manager, Erik Tenhaag, after the Dutchman cited that Sancho hasn't been training well, which led to him being left out of the set-up back in September, after a defeat to Arsenal. Sancho would then take to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to lash out against his coaches' claims. Please don't believe everything you read. I will not allow people saying things that are completely untrue. I have conducted myself in training very well this week. I believe there are other reasons for this matter that I won't go into. I have been a scapegoat for a long time, which isn't fair. Well, Sancho would eventually delete the post from his page, but that wouldn't prevent Erik Tenhaag from banishing the Englishman from all first-team activities until an apology has been made by the disgruntled winger. An apology is that Sancho is yet to deliver. Now it seems that Sancho may be on his way out of Manchester and on his way back to the yellow wall, that is BVB. Well here to discuss this recent development is one of our football correspondents, Simon Evans. Good afternoon, Simon. Happy New Year. Good afternoon, Mariah. Happy New Year to you too. Yeah, just unfortunate that we're starting the year speaking about. I would say this is an unfortunate situation because Jadon Sancho, a player that has shown a lot of promise for Borussia Dortmund, I felt as if his inclusion into Manchester United would only help the team, but we see that this fallout has instead hurt the team. Yeah, it hasn't been helpful for anybody. I mean, look, it's been a difficult time at Manchester United overall for Jadon Sancho. He arrived when Solskjaer was manager and didn't really settle into the team very easily then. He didn't work out great for him under Ragnick, who gave him a chance and put him in a more central position and asked him to do a lot of pressing and that kind of work. But then he didn't really develop from there and then Ten Hargis come in and as you just documented, it's been a very difficult relationship, one that's just not been functional. So a low move to Borussia Dortmund is now on the agenda. And to be honest, as long as Ten Hargis of Manchester United and Sancho isn't apologising to him, it makes complete sense for him to go somewhere else. Yeah, and speaking about making complete sense, I think, you know, Jadon Sancho not playing for Manchester United, despite being a part of the setup, if I'm to even say so, has been hurting the player because when I think about, of course, there's no stats for other teams to look at. His market value has, of course, decreased his playing time. So we really can't say if he is informed. Well, I'll have to say he's not informed because we have not seen him playing. So I think for Jadon Sancho, the footballer himself, it is beneficial to him, if not anyone, to be playing football for whichever club it is. Oh, absolutely. This can't carry on for him and really to go to the end of the season until May or June with this situation is just impossible for him. You know, let's not forget he was a player who was a very much part of Garos Southgate's England setup. There was a time when he was one of the first-choice strikers playing great performance in the Nations League once against Spain when England won away, where he looked like an exciting player for the future of English football. He did so well for Dortmund in Germany that people were buying for Exignature United. It was a real coup for them to get him. They spent a lot of money on him. And his career is just frittering away at the moment. So he desperately needs this move and I hope for him as a player, it's a move that works out for him. If he goes back to Dortmund, it's somewhere familiar where he knows, where the fans like him, where he should be able to thrive again and then he can have a look at his options again in the summer. Yeah, in his Dortmund stint he had 137 games, he had 50 goals, he had 64 assists and I think those stats were so mouthwatering that Manchester United could not help themselves. Do you see him with the current Borussia Dortmund set up right now, fitting back in perfectly? It's a difficult one to know exactly where the Dortmund would have to adjust things a little bit. But I think his natural position is wide on the right. And I think if Dortmund wants him back, that's where they're going to play him. They've got two or three options in the number 10 position and there's Marco Roos and there's Geo Reiner there as well. And other people, so I imagine him to play either wide on the right or wide on the left as an inverted winger and get back to doing what he did well, which would be a direct winger who would cut in and go for goal or go wide and then deliver crosses for striker. It's not a complicated one, tactically, where you play Jadon Sancho. It's about playing him and getting the most out of him. Just neither of the three managers he worked under at Manchester United were able to do that. Yeah, Simon Hamlet stresses this story on manager Eric Tenhagg because they paid £73 million for him in 2021. And Tenhagg himself is having some struggles with building this team into a consistently good unit. Yeah, I think it's not helped Tenhagg at all. I don't think it helps the team atmosphere when you have a player who everybody knows every day that they go to training ground, he's training separately or is with the youth team players. I think it can be something that can disturb the mood and the atmosphere. And you know, the way Tenhagg approached it, you know, there's been people who have been critical of that, both inside and outside of Old Trafford, who said there were different ways of handling this. You know, there are ways... If you have a talented player and it's not working somehow and there's been a breakdown in the discipline, if that's what the case is, because obviously Sancho denies that, you know, you have to manage that situation and bring them back into the fold sometime. And he hasn't been able to do that, so that raises yet another question mark about Tenhagg at the time when there were many. Yeah, and the other aspect of this story, when it just broke, Simon, and you've got your pulse on these stories, there were, I thought at the time, contradicting stories about how much support he had from, let's say, teammates or people, you know, within the setup. But it has been so protracted now that I think it does appear in the end that Tenhagg's position is more favored than a reverse position. Yeah, I don't think Sancho is that level of player where his refusal to cooperate would lead to the manager being forced out as a result of it. You can see that with a Cristiano Ronaldo or a Messi or maybe even a Harry Kane, you know, those stature of players, as much money as they spent on him and they did spend, you know, you save 70 odd million on him. He's still not bigger than the coach of that club. And, you know, one of the other factors in all of this, of course, is if he goes on loan for six months, which is what is being reported, will Eric Tenhagg be the manager of Manchester United when he finishes that loan spell? And if he comes back to Manchester United in the summer, does he come back to a different manager who might have a different approach to him? Yeah, a strong statement there by you, Simon, because it does appear as if you are open to the possibility of Tenhagg's role being at the moment tenuous. Well, I think it's tenuous in the sense that, you know, Jim Ratcliffe and his team have come in. They are examining a lot of things. They're looking at bringing in, you know, new technical stuff, this talk of Dan Ashworth, who was part of the England setup, was also at Brighton, now at Newcastle, and other people coming in from the INEOS group to work on the football side and really overhauling the football operation. And if the performances on the field continue to be the way they are, I think it's just logical to think that they will look at the very least about whether Tenhagg and what he's done so far at United in difficult circumstances with a different football operation than the one they're trying to put in place. But is he really the best man to take them forward? So I would expect that to be reviewed at the end of this season. I'd be surprised if Ratcliffe and his team, David Brentsville and so on, don't review that. Yeah, well, he's certainly gotten the support Tenhagg from that crowd up to this point. But the fact is, for a Manchester United fan, they've had so many managerial changes since Sir Alex Ferguson left that there's a part of a Man United fan that just is tired of these changes and want some sort of steadiness in the managerial role. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And actually, United fans are all trafficked, you know, over the years when I was attending games there regularly. I've been very patient with their managers, not like fans of a little club, as you could mention. You know, they'd never turned against Mourinho. I never heard a chant for Mourinho out. They were very, very supportive to Solskjaer during times when the team weren't winning until right at the very end. Ragnick, they didn't really want to, but I don't recall there being massive protests against Ragnick. And they wanted Tenhagg to work out and be reluctant to turn against him. Even so, I think, you know, if you put together a run of four or five wins, you think he'd have the support of the fans. And, you know, the people coming in, they don't want to come in and immediately start changing things at that level. They'd like to see it succeed and be some signs there that they can start in the summer. But if you go into being a position where you bring in new people above him and you're going to be investing money in the squad, it is logical to look at it and say, is this the right person to spend whatever the budget, and it'll be another astronomical budget for rebuilding the current squad, is he the right person to do that? So I think that's just a logical, it's not a case of trying to get rid of him or that they should get rid of him. It's a case, I think it'll be entirely logical for them to review that. And if they haven't done well this season, that's not going to help him. Right, and you know, Simon, speaking about wages, I'm also thinking about Borussia Dortmund and whether or not they can afford to pay the full wages for Jadon Sancho. Yeah, that's something they'll have to work out. It's not uncommon in these situations for the hosting club, the parent club, if you like, to contribute to the wages. Sometimes, you know, it can be 50-50 or variation of that. But yeah, the money is on it. Manchester United will be a lot more than, I think, anybody at Borussia Dortmund. So that will be something that they would have to look at and work at and it could yet be a stumbling point, one would imagine. Yeah, and one of the debates that I was listening to, leading up, of course, to this transfer saga, is that Jadon Sancho has not contributed enough for Manchester United. And as a matter of fact, many people feel as if, you know, he should go because he's a liability to the team and he hasn't contributed. But I feel, Simon, personally, that many people have not taken into consideration that this is a young boy, 23 years of age, who a lot was expected of joining a Manchester United setup that, of course, was in turmoil, really, really underperforming. And then he did not get the amount of minutes that he got at Borussia Dortmund before the fallout. What's your take on that debate? I think he was given a really good opportunity by Solskjaer. They used him a lot. They really wanted it to, I mean, they brought him in. They wanted him to succeed. They wanted to, you know, see him grow into the team and knew that would take some time. And he just never really clicked. So then he started going to the bench there. And I think of the 10 hugs, you know, he inherited the situation where Sancho wasn't an automatic starter. So Sancho, the oldest was on Sancho in that situation to prove himself to 10 hug and prove that he deserved to come into the team and should be a starter. That's not happened. What happened on the training ground? It's one person's word against another. So we don't know that. All we know that is that if a manager takes a stance where he has a first team player who's cost of money and he chooses not to use him, then something's obviously not right. How soon do you expect us to find out where didn't Sancho really, really ends up? Yeah, these things can drag on a little bit. The January window is open. It could happen any time between now and the end of the month. But this is an early move from Dortmund. So you would think if United are open to it and they can find that financial compromise on the wages, then it could happen quite soon. All right. Well, that's a wrap there, Simon. We want to thank you so much for joining us. And we hope that there comes a time when this discussion between Sancho as well is wrapped up and we could get to see him back to, of course, enjoying the best of his football. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks very much. All the best. All right, Simon Evans there. Our football correspondent. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.