Jadon Sancho picked up the ball at the halfway line, and the rest was unadulterated football filth.
The England international’s long dash towards goal, shuffling the ball in and out to leave Wolfsburg defender Paulo Otavio prostrate on the floor, would have had a full Signal Iduna Park on its feet, screaming in anticipation of near-certain bliss.
Advertisem*nt
His joy had been a long time coming, much longer than the six seconds and 50 metres it took the 20-year-old to turn a counter-attack opportunity into the goal that sealed Borussia Dortmund’s 2-0 win last weekend. Sancho hadn’t scored in the Bundesliga since a May hat-trick against Paderborn. His club hope that Sunday’s thrilling effort will mark the return of a more productive spell. They, too, couldn’t have helped but notice that he’s been not nearly as effective this season.
Even after breaking his league duck and also providing his fifth assist of the season, Sancho’s 2020-21 numbers are still miles off last season’s superlative record of 17 goals and just as many assists in the Bundesliga alone. They look worse still when juxtaposed with the €120 million that Manchester United couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay for him in the last transfer window.
One inevitable conclusion, drawn especially by those who’ve only seen him up close as an uneven performer for England manager Gareth Southgate, is that he’s simply not worth it. Overpriced.
A very different link between the failed transfer and Sancho’s loss of form was suggested by Dortmund chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke. The way the 61-year-old sees it, there’s a causal connection. “Maybe Jadon had subconsciously prepared for a move a bit,” Watzke told Kicker magazine on Monday. “I believe he at least thought about it so much that he lost a bit of his flow.”
It’s a theory as good as any for making sense of performances that have appeared a little low on confidence, but it’s impossible to prove or disprove. Team-mates and club officials spoken to by The Athletic say they haven’t noticed a change in his behaviour since October. If anything, he’s said to have become more disciplined and willing to listen to the concerns of his superiors. After he was filmed breaking COVID-19 restrictions to attend England colleague Tammy Abraham’s birthday party, Sancho was told to take greater care off the pitch and be discerning with social media posts. He listened.
Advertisem*nt
“People see him as a young kid who just plays football but he’s actually a really bright lad,” says someone close to the dressing room. Sancho has all but stopped talking to the media in Germany but has remained very approachable and easy-going within the Dortmund camp, which goes some way to explain why his problems matching last season’s heights have been met with a supportive attitude rather than criticism. “Other players don’t blame him, they don’t feel let down. There’s more a sense of, ‘Come on, you can do it’,” the source says.
Dortmund are a club well-versed in fostering talent and understand that the output from young players tends to fluctuate. “It’s easy to forget that he’s still 20 years old. A few ups and downs are to expected,” an official says.
Luck can play a bigger role than realised, too. Sancho set the Bundesliga alight last season with his goals and assists, but an exploration of his underlying numbers with the help of Statsbomb (via FBref) shows that he outperformed expectations. His goals-per-90-minutes rate of 0.67 last season shows he was scoring at a rate of more than a goal every two games. However, looking at his non-penalty expected goals (npxG) across the season, we see he was only expected to score 9.3 goals given the quality of chances he found himself in.
This difference is likely to point towards some elite finishing, but Sancho’s xG overperformance of 7.7 goals was the highest of any player in the Bundesliga last term (Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski, for example, outperformed his xG by 5.3 goals).
It was always likely that Sancho would return to a more “normal” output this season. Players might heavily outperform or underperform their xG for a while but, over an extended period, they are all likely to hover more closely around the number of goals they are expected to score. It might be a few goals off either side, but an overperformance by nearly 60 per cent (9.3 xG vs 17 goals) from Sancho last season was unlikely to be sustainable. In other words, he looked a little better than he really was in 2019-20, which makes the drop-off so far in 2020-21 not as dramatic.
Advertisem*nt
In fact, his xG per 90 has not “fallen off a cliff” at all this season. Last season, his xG per 90 was 0.36 and it’s 0.32 this season. But his luck seems to have gone the other way so far in the current campaign, with only one goal scored from an xG of 3.4.
Evidence of his change in fortune is shown in the two examples below. Sancho managed to score this chance with his weaker foot against Cologne last season, with the ball somehow getting through the many bodies between him and the goal. That shot had an xG of 0.02 — meaning there was just a two per cent chance it would result in a goal. It was highly unlikely to find the back of the net, but it did.
Conversely, Sancho got himself into a great position as Dortmund were on the break against Werder Bremen last month. When the ball reached him, his xG value to score was 0.39 — far higher than the example against Cologne above, and an opportunity that Sancho would typically score.
However, in this case, the shot wasn’t even on target, ballooning high and wide into the stand. It shows that he is perhaps low on luck this season, but still getting himself into good positions — and as we are talking about a smaller sample compared to all of last season, you would imagine his goal output will begin to improve as this season plays out. If the goals do start to flow for Sancho over the next few games, supporters and the media will read it as his self-belief returning but, statistically, he’ll only be scoring the goals he should have scored all along.
What does look to have suffered is Sancho’s creativity.
Using Statsbomb data, we can look at his “goal-creating actions”, which denote the two offensive actions directly leading to a goal (eg, passes, dribbles, and drawing fouls). Last season, Sancho was providing 1.26 goal-creating actions per 90 minutes, the highest in the Bundesliga — ahead of Bayern’s Thomas Muller (1.12) and RB Leipzig’s Christopher Nkunku (1.03) in third. For further context, Sancho’s rate of 1.26 placed him second across the top five European leagues, with only Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez ahead of him at 1.44.
This season? His creativity does look to have dropped off, with 0.82 goal-creating actions per 90 — 15th best in the Bundesliga and 42nd across the top five European leagues.
Advertisem*nt
This decrease can be highlighted further when looking at Sancho’s profile onsmarterscout, a site that gives detailed analytics on players all over the world, with ratings from zero to 99 that you can think of a bit like the player ratings on FIFA but powered by real data and advanced analytics. Let’s take a look at his numbers for the 2019-20 season and in 2020-21 so far.
Looking at his pizza charts for this season and the last one, we can see a significant decrease in his “collective” attacking output — particularly his xG from shot creation and ball progression, which is less than half this season what it was in 2019-20.
His ability on the ball does remain pretty solid, as he remains active in linking the play and retaining the ball well. His carry and dribble volume has actually improved from 47 to 63 (out of 99).
Why Sancho would find it harder to prove telling in the final third is harder to ascertain.
It could be down to 10-goal top scorer Erling Haaland missing their last four games of 2020 through injury or Dortmund on the whole struggling to play with the same incision they mustered under coach Lucien Favre — who was sacked on December 13 — last season.
Either way, the club remain convinced of Sancho’s qualities and determined to make the most of what should prove his last five months in their shirt.
A few more instances of solo brilliance akin to that run against Wolfsburg would also convince more casual observers of the young Londoner’s immense potential.
(Top photo: Leon Kuegeler/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
