Goodbye yellow brick road? Why Jadon Sancho should stay at Borussia Dortmund, where he feels at home, and the frustration that Watford made only £3m for nurturing him.
Sancho's bravura performance against PS-G highlights more issues than his stand-off with Erik ten Hag.
It still feels wrong that a player who delivered so magnificently for Borussia Dortmund in their 1-0 win over Paris St-Germain on Wednesday, who has moved for more than £80m in fees, generated only £3m for Watford, who spent seven years nurturing him. And Watford were initially awarded only £66,000 for Jadon Sancho.
Dortmund’s Yellow Wall is rather more vaunted and vast than the yellow splash of the Rookery End at Watford’s Vicarage Road. Yet when Sancho set out on the yellow brick road of his career, it was first playing for Watford that was the dream. The rejuvenation of Sancho fills many current headlines and online debates, often as a stick to beat Erik ten Hag with, but the story carries far more significance than tension between a manager and player.
The story is also about the tension between elite clubs and those down the pyramid, those who do the early hard work in developing future stars. Watford took the seven-year-old Sancho from the Guinness Trust Building estate in south London, put him in a boarding school in Hertfordshire, and gave him a fantastic footballing education in their academy. When he kept getting detention in his first year at Harefield Academy, Watford showed him some tough love and warned him that “if you don’t fix your attitude we will have no choice but to release you.”